The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

SCENE ONE: Nighttime, strip-bar, Bad Town.

“Drop ’em, baby—let them girls GO!” commanded the sitting man with the off-putting mole in the middle of his cheek.

“Pig! let GO—er, my ‘girls’!” And the standing blonde (that is, roots dark, otherwise much too blonde, basically white) in the fuzzy pink bra and panties, despite her sworn objective, wrenched her weirdly big, fake, yet uncannily realistic, boobies out of the man’s grasp. She at once gave up a look to the ceiling, suggesting she regretted her hasty words; her hands returned to the clasp at the back of the bra.

“Sure!—better THEY do all the touching!”

With trembling fingers, her face averted from that of the apparent stranger, “Bunny Blunderbusts”—aka, deep cover cop Flopsy Botchek—unhasped the fuzzy pink bandeau bra. It fell with the patron’s uninhibited delight onto his lap.

“Eureka!” shouted the patron. “Think I’m ready to make this dance full serv now —” he fished out a wad of bills from the pocket of his skin-colored suede blazer: “make that, I’m SURE I’m ready!” so spake the patron on better gander of the mock-dancer’s behind, shaked now into his fuller view with all the raunchy twitching assurance of a for-real dancer.

“Full serv?” “Bunny” echoed.

“Y’know,” the patron could scarce contain his excitement, his own fingers a-tremble but inches from that swinging be-fur thonged butt about popping up-and-down off his dick. “FULL service . . .”

“I . . . I’m not that kinda’ girl!” Bunny grabbed up her bra, in the process quavering, perhaps to feel under it in the man’s pants a complete stranger’s bulging hard boner.

“Hey-hey—where you going? We were just getting started!”

“Short lap dance!” chuckled the attending bar tough on a stool outside the private rooms area of the Darwin Lamarck-owned lap-dance establishment—The Milky Weights.

Struggling to get the strapless bra secure back over her new-inflated cans, Bunny blinked to hold at bay the tears threatening to burst from her eyes any second.

“Pretty stupid—gettin’ worked up over a john.”

“Give the kid a break, B.T.,” a black woman with a sincerely easy air came over to lay a friendly hand on Bunny’s shoulder. “It’s her first night. Let me guess,” she had an accent and her voice was like silk, “he asked for full serv, didn’t he?”

Bunny nodded, her mortification apparently ebbing the moment a friendly presence was nearby.

She wiped her eyes and grew firmer in her resolve. “I’m all right. It’s only first day jitters, like you said.” She struggled, sadly, still with her bandeau bra.

“You better get a lid on ’em quick,” gruffed the man known as B.T. “You’re set to go on stage in five minutes!”

Bunny visibly quailed at these words: “stage . . . five minutes!”

“Don’t tell me,” the soft-voiced stripper asked the newbie, “this is your first stage dance?”

“Y-Yeah. I was waiting tables before. Then, this patron . . .” she indicated back to where the private rooms were.

“Patron!” the stripper guffawed, and despite her soft voice, her friendliness, in a way difficult not to apprehend as ridiculing. “We call ’em ‘johns’ here, girl!”

Bunny blanched again. “H-He was my first private dance and . . . and I messed it all up!”

“Aw!” the stripper responded in the tone one uses with little crippled animals. “There’ll be others—with hips like you got, sister, believe me,” she smiled so well here, it was as though with an earnest joy—“there’ll be lotsa others!”

“. . . Y’know,” Bunny tried to speak casually, “I’d feel lots better if I—. . . You think I could get a drink before I go on stage?”

“No drinkin’ on the clock!” B.T. declaimed.

“Sorry,” the stripper said this friendlily, but in not the least as though she regretted relaying the bad news; she seemed too happy in general to regret things. “Strict house policy,” (her voice dropped on the word “policy” to a much lower, a much more humming register; it was a delightful thing; it was as though she didn’t understand what the word meant, but in a striking, feminine, way, she understood that she didn’t understand what it meant) “courtesy o’ Mr. L. But afterhours—all drinks are free, provided you made your quota of private dances for the night!”

Bunny gave an uneasy smile to the friendly stripper’s utterly blithe one.

“She had her meds yet?” the friendly stripper suddenly asked the big guy on the stool behind her.

He grunted: “Said she didn’t want ’em!”

“Like, no wonder you’re nervous—you GOTTA take your meds, girl!”

The friendly stripper pulled out a small pink vial of powder from her rose-blossom cleavage.

“You don’t wanna be drinkin’ anyway when you’re about to go on for a stage-dance. Trust me. Drinking only makes you sloppy. This stuff makes you feel good AND it makes you dance way better!”

“And the better you dance,” piped in B.T., “the more you earn—for yourself and the establishment—that’s simple economics. Good little girls who take their meds earn twice what the bitches as don’t—it’s proven!”

“None o’ us girls work without it,” the friendly stripper affirmed. “And best thing is, at the Milky Weights, all your meds is totally paid for! Mr. L.’s real classy on that.” The black woman wiggled her behind subtly as she said the name of the owner. “One o’ the reasons this is the best boobs-bar to work at in all Bad Town. ‘Meds’, by the way, that’s house lingo for Spank . . .”

“Angel Spank? That new aphrodisiac rave drug we were warned to watch out for . . ? I mean, I’ve heard of it—yeah.”

“Ever try it?”

Bunny shook her noggin.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” she looked dull-eyed at her. “Makes your whole body feel like—Mmm!—SEX!”

The friendly stripper stuck a finger in the vial and put the same finger under her lips. She tried teasingly to insert the same finger into Bunny’s mouth. Bunny looked annoyed. In less than the time it took Bunny to stare on quietly in amazement, the stripper then tapped out a nicely short line on the very same finger of her other hand. And then she snorted up the line. An instant passed, and the stripper moaned softly once more, a glazed, still lustier look permeating her eyes. She reached out and put an arm round Bunny’s neck, smiling at her very suggestively. The two women’s big boobs happened to rub together. The black stripper handed out the half-full vial to the scared one.

Bunny waved away the illicit substance, changed subjects: “So . . . You know Mr. Lamarck?”

Her new friend grew giggly when asked this question; in addition, she pulled herself even more overfamiliarly close to Bunny before answering it; but perhaps that was only so she might better speak in a low, creaking voice her next aside: “He’s the OTHER reason workin’ at the Milky Weights—the BEST!”

“What do you mean?”

“You never met him yet—have you?” At the last couple syllables, she dropped some octaves. She had a voice would make the world wish to roll over. It would take someone subtler than Bunny to see what an alluring tradition was trapped—possibly lost forever—in a mere stripper’s voice. But rest assured it was a happy tradition, once.

“Well, sort of . . .” Bunny paused significantly, resumed: “He was there at my audition, but it was dark where he was sitting. He didn’t say a word to me or to anyone, the whole time I was performing.”

“But he must have liked what he saw, or you wouldn’t have got the job. You wanna know why the Milky Weights outperforms all its competitors? ’Cause Mr. L.’s got a faultless eye for talent!”

For whatever reason, Bunny looked flattered at this estimation of her potential to induce erections.

“Hey, my name’s Jabona—Jabona Juggins—but everyone round here calls me J.J. Or just J. Or some o’ the regs call me Juggs, too. O yeah, and one-two call me Juice (don’t ask . . .); shit—call me what you like—I can tell we’re gonna be real close!” This friendly stripper J.J., who had still one arm around the other and was leaning close in, lay her hand on the new stripper’s boobs as pragmatic underline of her last remark.

“I’m Bunny.”

The jilted patron with the mole in the middle of his cheek came strolling out of the private room.

“Sucks!” he complained to the guy on the stool. “I paid for a lap-dance and SHE—!” he pointed accusingly at Bunny.

“I got this one,” J.J. said. “C’mon, big-boy. You want full serv—I’ll GIVE you full serv!”

“You don’t have to do that —” Bunny tried to dissuade her new friend. She whispered: “Really, I would NEVER ask you to prostitute yourself for —!”

“Why not?” J.J. shrugged: “Feels good. Pays good. AND I don’t have to bleach my skin—Win-win-win!” Bunny was evidently stunned enough with this response to protest no further.

“But . . .” the patron did. “I want HER!”

B.T. stood up from the stool and spoke as though he were reading from a script: “Girls at the Milky Weights—or at any other Lamarck, Limited locale—have the right at any time to refuse any and all kinds of service—including full!”

“But she didn’t refuse—she already agreed to the lap-dance. Hell, if it’s just about the full service thing, you can forget I ever mentioned it. Thought I was giving her a compliment—most the girls here get offended if you don’t at least ask. Look, I just wanna see what I paid for, a full-body strip!”

“Hey, buddy,” J.J. lifted one of his limp hands and rested it on one of her big boobs. “Tell you what, you forget her—I’ll throw in ‘diesel’, too. Whattaya say?”

The guy’s eyes bulged cartoonish: “Du-u-u-u-u-u-uh—okay!”

Sending a commiserative wink to the grateful Bunny, J.J. took the patron’s arm and walked back to the private rooms with him.

“What’s diesel?” Bunny asked B.T.

“Heheheh . . .”

Bunny smiled uncomfortably. “I-I can’t believe I messed that up —” she tried to exonerate herself before the hired muscle. “Th-This has never happened to me before! In my last job, I ALWAYS got my . . . my customers satisfied! And I’ve practiced, OVER AND OVER, in my apartment—But it’s harder than I thought, dancing in front of strangers . . .”

B.T. replied gruffly: “Don’t matter none to me. If you don’t like earning money, just keep refusing the full serv.”

“Mr. Lamarck said to all us girls auditioning that it was our choice . . .”

“And that’s the truth. ’ Course, it’s simple economics; all the goils come round to seeing that eventually. Some, it takes a week, some, maybe a month—I knew one goil, took a full year—but they all end up going ‘full serv’; and more go ‘diesel’ than don’t, too!”

“Uuuuh,” Bunny looked to be deliberating inwardly; then, cat-like, but self-conscious, she slid her arm under his, and pressed lightly into him her remarkably realistic tits (they weren’t lying, those ads for Dr. Nippers as “best for breasts”). “You’re not gonna tell Mr. L. about this li’l screw up of mine, are ya, B.T.?”

“No reason to tell him,” indifferently replied the tough. “He sees everything.” His eyes darted up to a place in the corner of the ceiling, where a surveillance camera hung.

Again, Bunny looked disconcerted. Again, she seemed to remember herself, pressed herself into the glorified bouncer.

“Doesn’t Mr. Lamarck ever come into the bar to see the girls, y’know, in person?”

“On occasion. But usually, if he likes a girl, he sends her an ‘invite’. She and maybe one or two others are then free if they wanna to meet him for a private party at his mansion.”

“What do you mean, they’re free to . . ?”

“I ain’t never seen one girl turn him down, but yeah, hypothetically, if one ever did, she wouldn’t lose her job or nothin’.”

Bunny was intrigued. “How does a girl get one of these ‘invites’?”

“If boss likes what he sees,” he again glanced up at the surveillance camera, “believe me, you’ll know.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“O—you’ll know that, too! If boss don’t like a girl, she’s out on her ass before she can spread it. Mr. L. can be a prick, sure—but knows his business. You’re just about on,” observed B.T.

Bunny seemed reluctant to surrender his arm, her expression worthy her small, scared alias namesake; it must have struck pity even into the heart of that hardened muscular excuse for a human vegetable. “You’re not going to puke, are you?”

Bunny gulped, as though perhaps she had been contemplating some such thing.

“Listen,” the big man said. “I know a lot o’ goils, just startin’ out, don’t like the idea at first o’ snortin’, like how Juggs just did—think it’s gonna ruin their pretty li’l noses. Snortin’s by far the best way to take the Spank—’cause it acts fastest and it’s sure as hell stronger. Still, I got a little of it in the pill form. I’ll give you one, but . . .,” [his usual going price of exchange was a bj for a pill—ed.] “Forget it! You want it or not?”

Backstage, Bunny encountered a young lanky black-haired vixen dressed up in a thong-back black leather one-piece. She had colorful tattoos all up and down one arm and in one very eye-catching spot within her deep cleavage.

“It’s Ack! on now,” said the tattooed woman. “But she’s just finishing.”

The tattooed woman, who was checking her gratuitous makeup by a large vanity mirror bordered by gaudy yellow light-bulbs, strolled over to the side of the stage, where Bunny watched from behind the curtain the dancer known as Ack!, a full-figured Latina with natural tits outsizing Bunny’s enormous fake ones.

“Look—her pussy!” the tattooed dancer whispered, smiling lasciviously.

“[Gasp!] It’s—wet!”

“That’s her trademark,” and the leather dancer added jealously—“Even more famous for that than her big nats. Ack! gets so turned on while dancing, you can actually SEE it. Wish I could do that. You wouldn’t believe what she takes home in tips at the end of the night.”

With an agonized expression, Bunny watched one moment more that proudly shameless big-boobed senora practically dripping in her spinning spread eagle on the stage.

The tattooed woman departed. Looking around, Bunny withdrew the pink pill B.T. had just given her. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Flopsy!” she said to herself, and she slipped the pill onto her tongue.

Before the hollering and hoots accompanying Ack!’s moist finale had died away, Bunny had begun to blush, rub her sweaty forehead, most strangely, to lick her mouth the more and more avidly. All this to say, she no longer looked the least bit nervous—or not at all for the same reason. When Ack! at last joined her back-stage, wearing nothing but a cache of dollars in her clutched-together fat bosom, she thoroughly ignored the newbie. Bunny, for her part, had no eyes for the exceptional dancer, either. She had no eyes for anyone; hers were closed, her tongue, on the contrary, completely visible, extended from her mouth to lick more and more her lips.

To a deafening bass beat, Bunny strolled out onto the stage.

Not waiting till even she had reached the pole at the far end of the pavilion, the inspired dancer distractedly tore off her fuzzy bra, and making use of the side-snaps on her thong, ripped it off too in a simple, indifferent gesture, thus defying centuries of schools of thought on the art of the tease, which stipulate sluts should always bend over first, butt out, so as to slowly as possible roll their panties down . . .

Boobs and bare bottom borne, Bunny froze, but clearly not from fear. Too clearly, that is, she had frozen from arousal.

Despite the loud thumping music she was supposedly dancing to (for the time being she stood motionless), there was a stillness in the bar. Some of this must have been on account of that truly wonderful butt of hers, and that she had been duly announced before coming out as a first-timer. The audience—composed of many regulars—had grown still from curiosity. But as she continued to do essentially nothing but lick her lips over and over, very slowly, still the crowd stayed mostly silent.

Good thing they gave her their attention, else they would’ve missed one of the wettest debuts the Milky Weights had so far showcased, even including those incorporating creative uses of plumbing, showers, say, fire hoses, mist-machines, etc. Bunny twitched three times her bared, barely hairy pussy first outward, then farther outward, and finally so that her whole waist stuck strangely out in front of her, her back slouched against the pole. A slow murmur of approval arose from all sides of the stage.

When Bunny came to—she appeared to have physically blacked out for half a second—she stood exactly in this way—her hips thrust out, back against the pole. Someone in the audience called something out very loudly. There was a greater commotion. Dazedly, Bunny reached between her legs, pulled that hand to her face. All could see what she saw: her hand was dripping. Bunny’s overactive tongue took over, licking her fingers over and over with bizarre rapacity. The murmuring from the audience grew even louder. With another jerky twitch of less her body than her pussy, specifically—as though it, and it alone of her, were being pulled forward by an invisible magnet—Bunny was freed of her slump against the silver pole; overcoming her initial jerkiness, she commenced fluidly to dance, as though she had done nothing else with her body or her life.

“Damn, girl—that was HOT!” her new friend J.J. was there to praise her when Bunny scampered backstage clutching her own immense wad of dollars. “I never would’ve guessed it’s your first time.”

Bunny giggled, her giggle crescendoing unexpectedly at the end of it into a lusty growl. She looked to wish to pounce on J.J.

“Then—you tried the Spank! What’d you think?”

Bunny put a finger to her lip, as if thoughtfully; next, not at all thoughtfully, she sucked her finger: “Mmm—LOVE it!” she gaped. Slowly, she took the finger she’d been sucking out of her own mouth and stuck it without warning into the mouth of her new friend.

“Mmm,” purred J.J. “An’ I think I love YOU, new girl!”

Bunny looked about to squeal and hop with delight, but was cut short.

“You dirty BITCH!” Appearing as if out of nowhere, Ack! shoved Bunny off the affectionate black stripper.

“What’s with you?” J.J. demanded of the irate Latina.

“She stole my act!”

“There ain’t no law,” replied J.J. in a logical tone, “says one dancer squirts on stage, another can’t . . .”

Ack! didn’t respond but again shoved Bunny, who shoved the huge-titted dancer back; Bunny then grabbed Ack! by her long black hair and pulled her so hard downward the latina lost her balance and fell on her huge boobs on the floor.

“Wow!” J.J. was impressed. “Who taught you self-defense, Buns? I want lessons.”

Bunny stepped carelessly over the sprawling woman, the better to rub up suggestively against J.J. again. “Me too—from YOU!—Never felt . . . You’re SO . . !” while speaking Bunny looked to wish to rub the other dancer up and down with her hands; she kept moving these at her sides, occasionally lightly touching J.J.’s body here and there, as though she would any second tear off the flimsy clothes the other currently wore—a v-back yellow microkini with a school girl-style plaid mini. But there was something still restrained in Bunny, something joyfully restrained, something as if just about dying for someone else to make the first move.

“Sounds hot,” opined J.J. “But I’m up next,” she indicated the main stage. “You better get some clothes on yourself—but not too many [wink!]—and start working the tables. I bet—after that amazing show you put on—there’s gonna be hundreds o’ guys lining up for private dances.”

“First,” Bunny replied; however, her friend’s words must have reminded her she was naked. She had stepped a little away from her to grab carelessly the first top from a rack of them she laid her hand on—a gold lame cowboy vest—“Gotta man I need to catch . . .”

“Who you mean?”

Ack! was on her feet again. “You just watch yo’self,” she said to Bunny lamely, and hobbling off, more bruised in the ego than anywhere else.

“No man EVER got away from me before—and you can bet that cute ass o’ yours—none NEVER will!” Bunny pulled a pair of gold spangle booty-shorts up over her wide butt, slid her little feet swiftly into a bystanding pair of red stiletto cowboy boots.

“Are you talkin’ the john you ran out on earlier?” J.J. asked. “I got some good news! Even after three holes and all my best nut-busting moves, the guy didn’t cum. I swear, he must have some tantric skills, or I don’t know what.” Then she pointed through the curtain at a table. “I bet-chya can still catch him.”

“Sorry I missed your show —” the man with the conspicuous mole greeted the cowgirl (Bunny now had on a gold cowboy hat as well); “by what I hear, you weren’t at all shy. What gives?—You can strut it for all these guys just fine, but can’t dance private for me . . ?”

She grabbed him straight by the bulge in his lap.

“C’mon—Let me make it up to you—Big boy!”

“Do you mean . . ?” the man gave her a significant look. “Full service?” Bunny stroked his bulge with a mischievous grin.

“WhatEVER it takes—Mmm!—I ALWAYS get my man!”

SCENE TWO: Noontime. Driveway, Nerval Ramensky’s house. Good Town.

“Flops! Honey—come in-come in!” from the front doorstep Nerval Ramensky greeted the “blonde bombshell stripper”, his wife Flopsy Botchek—aka “incognita police detective” Bunny Blunderbusts. He ushered her quick into the house, throwing a furtive look over his shoulder at the other houses on the block. Up and down the street appeared quiet.

In his ushering her in, guiding her to the front room, where he had lunch laid out for the two of them—store-bought sandwiches—he seemed to be making extra careful not to brush accidentally either of her big boobs in the process, so much so he didn’t lay his hand over his wife’s shoulder, as he might have, his “true love” whom he hadn’t seen for “so long”, but rather on the small of her back, and even then only timidly, from behind. His wife seemed to notice this, a bemused smile on her lips as she came to a standstill in the entranceway of the main room and paused, as if awaiting something more from her offput husband. Nerval acted all the stranger for the premonition he must have had that she thought that he was acting strangely; he said, “Here—have a seat!” and indicated the huge u-shaped tan couch of the main room (not to be confused with the beige one in the adjoining hearth-room, which, though it was immense, was really rather a loveseat, technically).

What should have seemed a polite direction for a first date or a complete stranger, elicited a cringe-inducing scoffing noise from his wife.

“Thanks for coming,” Nerval said uncomfortably. “I know you said we shouldn’t meet till after you’ve caught your perp, but—I-I’ve missed you . . . Uh, so bad.”

“I missed you, too,” these were the first words she had spoken since arriving and they sounded disconcertingly insincere. Her next words sounded annoyed: “But—yeah —” she smiled, an irritated smile, “I really shouldn’t be visiting you here, like this, now. We shouldn’t even call each other any more than we absolutely have to. For all I know, my movements are being tracked, my conversations listened in on.”

“Who by?”

She shrugged: “My perp? His boss? The Department? Who knows? Weren’t YOU the one who said you didn’t want anyone to see me with you until after I had the implants removed?”

“The kids are at school,” said Nerval. He pulled up a wood-armed, leather-upholstered chair and sat down across the coffee table from his wife. As he had set out the sandwiches originally side by side, however, this meant he had to stand up again presently to grab one of the ones on his wife’s side of the table and drag it over to his side; and so he did do, but with the manner of one realizing as he’s doing so he’s given away the game. “So, um—how’s the undercover thing going?”

Flopsy made no attempt to unwrap her sandwich from the deli paper it was in, slumped back onto the couch cushion. She was wearing a similar skirt-style business suit to that she’d worn her first day promoted to detective, a little tight in the hips but otherwise respectable. Or it should have been; the white blouse she wore presently under her suit jacket she hadn’t bothered to button beyond the crux of her cleavage, revealing a frill of black bra and a good deal too much skin besides. This, along with her too blonde hair, which she currently wore down in a manner out-of-keeping with the latent promise of professionalism in her suit, doubtless accounted for some of her husband’s present nervousness in her company.

“My ‘undercover-thing’?” she asked back, petulantly.

“Sorry—I mean . . . Um, what should I call it?”

Again, she shrugged, expressed that soft scoffing noise with her nose. Nerval winced.

“Well—Did you get it—the job you were trying to get, at the . . ?” probably to save himself actually saying the word, Nerval filled his mouth with sandwich.

“Strip bar?” and his wife smiled becomingly. “Yes! Now it’s just a matter of time, proving I can be trusted, working my way up the ladder, and getting in close to Mr . . .—to my boss.”

“Right—you said he’s the one knows where your perp is. What’s his name, incidentally?”

“Mr. . . .” for a reason neither’s face seemed to indicate either knew, the wife again avoided saying outright the owner’s name. “It’s not important. He’s not the one I’m after, at any rate, or not yet.”

“And the guy you ARE after—he’s an APIS operative?—what’s HIS name?”

Her husband waited expectantly, but again, and squinting her eyes as though suffering a sudden twinge in her head, Flopsy put off directly answering the question.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said at last: “How’s work been for you?”

Her husband breathed hard theatrically: “Bizz-EEE!” He took a rueful, smiling bite of his sandwich and continued to talk with his mouth full: “We’re currently working on what is without a doubt the biggest case the DA’s taken on since I was hired. We been after this guy for years, big crime kingpin in Bad Town—you’ve probably heard of him, Darwin Lamarck?”

Flopsy sat up straight at the name, and after an odd pause, began unwrapping her sandwich.

“Finally, some of your friends in blue have delivered us an informer who can connect him to shady business overseas: arms-dealing, drug-smuggling, draft-dodging—You name it, in one way or another this guy’s probably done it!”

“An informer?” his wife echoed. She had unwrapped her sandwich, but left it untouched on the table in front of her. “Who-who is he?”

“O—you wouldn’t know him. A little fish named Jimminaiah Hobbes. Not even important enough to have a criminal record, and yet somehow privy to all the information we need to reel this big fish in. We in the DA’s office have been looking for an informant like this for years. Only, there have already been several attempts on his life. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so busy—it’s been my job to move this witness around every few days to keep him safe, covering his tracks so no one finds his next location. Actually, right now he’s at a safehouse in Bad Town, not far from that apartment I lined up for you.”

“Where is he?”

Nerval looked about to tell her the exact address, but paused: “Um. Just wondering—but why do you want to know?”

“It’s probably nothing, but I think, this informant of yours, he might be of some use to me, too.”

“How’s that?”

She took a moment to answer: “I think he might be able to tell me something about my perp.”

“Your perp the APIS guy? Impossible! Why—APIS is a group of radicalized fundamentalist revolutionaries who think society’s become ‘pussified’, and advocate the use of stagy and largely nonfatal terrorism to bring about a return of ‘survival of the fittest’, their MMW, a ‘Meaner, Manlier World’. My informant has absolutely no record of any connection to a group like that. Neither does Darwin Lamarck, for that matter. We ran full background checks before we accepted this guy’s testimony; nothing even hints . . .”

Flopsy smiled her gentlest smile, which is to say, her least mischievous: “You’re right. I misspoke—I didn’t mean that he was IN APIS, necessarily, just that he might have some information . . .”

Again, her husband shook his head in bemusement: “Gee—I don’t know, honey . . .”

“The information I mean, HE may not even know he has . . . Anyway,” and she leaned across the table, laying her thin hand on Nerval’s hairless wrist, speaking softly, and flashing several inches more alluring cleavage at him in the process, “why don’t you just give me his address? I’ll ask him a few questions. What harm could it do?”

Nerval made a sound somewhere between an acquiescing groan and an apologetic sigh: “I don’t know . . . If something were to happen to him, before trial—it would be disastrous!

“What could possibly happen to him? It’s not like I want to hurt him,” she almost laughed as she said this, “just want to ask him a few questions. If he knows what I think he knows . . .”

“But what do you think he knows?” interjected Nerval, and as Flopsy hesitated to answer: “What is it you can’t tell me?”

“Can’t tell you?” she gave him a perplexed look, one hard to determine whether it was acted or not. “What’s there to tell? Like I said, I just want to ask him a few questions concerning my investigation. Tell you what, if you really want, I’ll lay out for you my whole investigation.”

“That doesn’t sound like such a bad idea . . .” her husband said, in a manner unexpectedly circumspect.

“But . . . Of course, I’ll have to wait to do that until AFTER I’ve closed my investigation.”

“Huh!”

Flopsy seemed perplexed a moment, then said: “I would hate to make you any more worried for my safety than you are already?”

“I see.”

“Look,” she squeezed his hand. “I wanna tell you EVERYTHING—I do! Nothing could possibly make me horn—, er, happier. But it’s hard right now, with everything still ongoing. That’s why I really didn’t even want to come over here today. Not because I don’t want to see you—I do!—but—like this—it just doesn’t feel . . . Once I’ve got my perp! Then, somehow, I just think, it’ll all be easier for both of us then, easier for us to move on with our lives!”

“Yes—That’s what you said before—And you’re right . . .”

“So,” she chuckled almost flirtatiously and then spoke with an oddly severe tone of voice for someone smiling: “Gimme his address, Nerval.”

“It’s not that easy . . . I don’t even know it, his current one, off the top of my head.”

“But you could get it for me?”

He sighed: “Let me think it over.”

“I really should be going,” his wife said. “So much undercover work to do before my shift tonight!”

“I understand . . . But, please. Stay a little longer.”

“We should have met downtown,” his wife, in tacitly agreeing to her husband’s request to stay longer, leaned back on the couch again. “But you’re afraid to be seen in public with me.”

“No—that is . . . It’s nothing personal, but if anybody saw me with you, like you are now, they might get the wrong idea.”

“Like I am now? The wrong idea?” she raised an eyebrow at him, so that he looked away sheepishly.

“Yeah—Because of you’re . . .”

Flopsy scoffed, but without the terrible nose sound: “You worry too much! I promised you I’d get rid of the implants after I get my man, right? Until then—why not just enjoy them?—Unless . . .” she had begun to play with the unbuttoned placket of her upper blouse, which incidentally allowed her not so subtly to brush her fingertips up the inside of the very feature of hers they were discussing; “What’s the matter?”

Nerval had turned slightly away from her: “It’s just I keep thinking—it’s silly of me, I know—but what if one of the kids were to come home early all of a sudden, or one of the neighbors came by to say ‘hi’—heheh!—they might see you like—like THIS!”

“If I don’t mind,” his wife’s eyes narrowed; “why should it bother you? It’s my body, after all. You know what I think? I think you don’t find me attractive anymore . . .”

“But—That’s not it!”

“You and I both know, Nerv, that when a man likes something he sees—he reaches out and TAKES it?” she paused provocatively, then added: “I wouldn’t stop you . . .”

Nerval gulped down another bite of his sandwich.

“Or perhaps,” she rose to her feet as a plume of smoke rises, ominous, easy—almost appetizing, “you’d prefer I do all the work. Y’know,” she began unbuttoning her suit-jacket, “it really doesn’t seem fair, me showing these off to other guys but not to you—my own husband—must be something I can do . . .” She removed her suit-jacket and tossed it onto the couch behind her, “ . . . to make it up to you.” She was unbuttoning her blouse next, in a vexing let’s-get-to-business fashion.

Nerval stood, too, and walked to a corner of the room, his back to his wife.

“What’s wrong now!”

“I just . . . I can’t stop imagining you doing what you’re doing now. For all those other guys you just mentioned.”

“But I told you, didn’t I?: I’m not—not really. Sure, they got me wearing some pretty revealing stuff. But I’m not stripping, only waiting tables.”

“I know, but . . . I can’t explain . . . Just thinking about you, half-naked—you said they have you basically waiting tables in your underwear!—with those ridiculous—, and all those men around—It drives me CRAZY!”

“You’re jealous?—how cute!” Flopsy’s expression changed from sultry to that familiar one of a month before, before she’d gone deep cover, of patronizing affection. Perhaps this return to old forms had something to do with Nerval’s turning back round towards her, a less agonized, more hopeful, but all in all, sad, expectant look on his too youthful face. “But you shouldn’t be,” the wife continued. “You know it’s all just a job to me; the way you act—I mean, you’d think it was something I WANTED to do, when really it feels . . . DISGUSTING!”

“I know-I know!” the husband ran to his wife’s side, with the object of comforting her, that one kind of smile on his face, that deserves its own name. For if there is a distinct smile for schadenfraude (joy in another’s misfortune)—which there is—so too there must be one for its pitying equivalent—joy-in-another’s-being-pathetic-enough-to-be-finally-deserving-of-pity.

The wife went on: “And add to how bad all of it is for me just how bad it is to have to feel always so bad for you! Nerval—don’t you see?—I feel TERRIBLE putting you through this . . .” She had backed away from him a little—who can say why?; but it did give her more license to stare listlessly around in her oration. “I understand what you’re going through.” She turned back to him; they kissed . . .

Soon they were on the couch, a torrid tussling. Flopsy was tearing her shirt off, Nerval was trying to remove his tie enough to unbutton his. When she was stripped down to an overstuffed bra, Flopsy reached carnivorously for her husband’s junk. She froze: “You . . . You’re not HARD?”

“Er, I—I can explain!”

“No thanks,” she laughed, a hollow, chilling laugh. “I really should get going.”

SCENE THREE: Afterhours. The Milky Weights, Bad Town.

“B.T.! ’Nother round o’ shots for all o’ us!”

“No thanksh. I really should ge’—goin’.”

“Nuh-UH!” J.J. slammed the bar with the ruddy palm of her hand. “In honor o’ your first week and yo’ first night makin’ quota—you partyin’ with us, Buns!”

“How many you make tonight, Ack!—girl!” called from across the bar a little Asian dancer with breasts about down to her knees.

“I only just broke quota,” said the Latina—“Seventeen—You?”

“Forty seven!” gushed the Asian.

“I don’t know what it is;” Ack! continued, very drunk, all the more oddly thoughtful for that. “I just can’t seem to go half-ass on ’em nomore. Before working at the Milky Weights, I used to turn tricks at this place in the Scums. I could get through forty johns easy, in less ’zen one night.”

“What happen’, girl?”

“Darwin Lamarck!” Ack! tittered, downed another shot. “Wha-can-I-say—man made me a perfectionisht!”

“Ain’t met him yet —” said the Asian. “Is he really . . ?”

“You jes’ wait. I bet he’ll ha’ you o’er ’ his place ’ notime . . .”

“Who’s he invite tonight?” this of the stripper with the sleeve tattoo.

B.T. answered the question grudgingly: “Invites not arrived yet.”

Bunny nudged her friend stripper’s arm and indicated the door to the bar. A man had just walked in, a man looking suspiciously like her partner’s “in” with the Feds, except with a weirdly out-of-place nose in the middle of his face.

J.J. laid a hand very affectionately on Bunny’s shoulder. “Thass Falswell. One o’ Mr. L.’s assoshiates, likes to come in sometimesh, barsh closhed. Sucks! always makes girls dance for him for a real long time, and doesn’t never tip!”

“His . . !” Bunny indicated her nose in ref to his weird-looking one.

J.J. snickered, shrugged. “A month ago he come in, a new nose, cursin’ some lady-cop, he said, took off his old one.” She shuddered. “Was ugly enough before!”

“Which one o’ you lucky ladies is going to be Gooly’s girlie this evening?” Falswell asked the strippers. On closer inspection, the man’s new nose was not merely wrongly-sized for his face, but the wrong color as well. No one responded to his question. “Mmm, fresh blood—hm-hm-hm-hmmm!” He had stepped over to Bunny, was running his hand creepily through her blonde-dyed hair. “I’ve got some calls to make in the back office—maybe after . . .” he moved his eyebrows up and down at her.

“Don’t worry, baby, I got your back,” J.J. whispered. “Nah, you don’t want her; she don’t even do full serv.” J.J. winked at her friend.

“Shame!” Falswell said. “DAMN shame!” He went into the office.

“J?”

“What is it, Buns?”

“If I tell you some’in’ . . . you promise ya’ can keep it secret?”

“O,” the silky voiced black stripper made the vowel sound as only she seemed especially able, somewhere between a remark of interest and an involuntary, sensuous, de-crescendoing moan. “I’m reeeal good at keepin’ secrets—ask an’body! Girls o’ our line o’ work hafta be!”

Bunny (psst, “Flopsy”!) paused, took another shot, which was offered her by the Asian, then—very flushed—broke into a contagious wet smile, nodding. “Yo-right!” Who could say why she so vigorously agreed with the other stripper on the banal point?

“But what ’s it, grrl? You tryin’ to tell me somethin’?” whispered J.J. to Bunny. Her hand had come down from her friend’s shoulder, was resting at the top of the other’s butt, her fingers playing in and out of the coin-slot afforded of what Bunny was wearing down there at the moment, a pair of tight blue panties.

Bunny sipped a drink just delivered her: “My real name—ih’s-not Bunny Blunderbush!”

“No doy. Jobona Juggins ain’t mine, neither.”

“My fer-real name’s Flopsy—Flopshy Bosh-shik . . .”

“You gotta be shitting me! With a name like that, why you go and change it for: you was born for porn, with a name like that!”

“Wait—ya’ haven’t heard o’ me?”

“Should I of?”

“I’m the hero cop—me!—the one ’ caught that APIS terrororisht a month ago—’s all over the news—’Member?”

“Wait, ain’t that the same lady-cop that Falswell’s all’ays complainin’ ’bout?”

Bunny said nothing.

“O—grrl! You did THAT to . . !” though exclaiming these things in gleeful surprise, J.J. had slipped into a whisper. “Buns, I ’ld kiss you jes’ for that—Hate that guy!” And as though drawn to each other’s lips by a mystical force, the two caressed, a very slow kiss. “But,” spoke up J.J. again, “if you’re her, how come, like, he di’n’t reco’nize you jes’ now?”

Bunny pushed her boobs into her friend in such an easy-going way as to suggest to an indifferent observer she had perhaps grown fairly accustomed to this leisure activity. “He ain’t never seen me ’th these ’fore.”

“O!” J.J. made that vowel sound again, to even greater effect. “So—what’chya doin’ here, though, wi’ THOSE, givin’ out tit-fucks to johns for, ’ you a cop? You wanna ’rest Falswell? Wouldn’t mind ’ you did. He’s a dick, an’ a pain in Mr. L.’s neck.”

“Whattaya mean? ’ Thought you said,” she paused to recall—“they’s asso-so-shiates?”

“I dunno ’ whole story, but ’parently Falshwellsh knows something ’bout Mr. L., and whatever ’s, can use it to get all sorts o’ favors from him. For instinct, all us girls are on special orders to dance free for him, if he asks!”

Bunny: “J., can I fer-realz trust you?”

“Ih’s me should be asking that! You’re a cop, huh? How I know you won’t ’rest ME!”

“Like—for what?”

“How much time you got, Buns-girl?” J.J. laughed. “For start’s—that line o’ Spank we did off each other’s tees a second ago?” she wiped her nose fondly at the memory; again as though driven from without by some cosmic force, the two kissed; the black dancer cleared her throat before resuming her thought: “Seem like ever’thin’ you seen me done could get me ’rested.”

“You worry too much—I ain’t here to ’rest you.”

“Wha—’bout Mr. L.—you ain’t gunna ’rest him?”

Bunny shook her head fervently: “I ain’t here to ’rest nobody—PROMISE! ’Though . . . Less jes’ say, I’m not entirely sure what Mr. L.’s connection to APIS’s.”

“APIS—’ fuck’s that?”

“Don’t you, like, never watch the news?” Bunny laughed.

“Nah—that stuff don’t really apply to Bad Town. But what’s it you’re after?”

“Man named . . . Uh, Perky—Perky Smaltits! Er, somethin’ like that—ever heard o’ him?”

J.J. gave her fellow dancer a weird look.

“I think—well, I know—yer boss an’ m’ perp ’re purty close.”

“Yeah?”

“An’ I nee- yer help findin’ him.”

“[BELCH!] What you nee- me to do?”

“Um. ‘Distra’t’ Falswell,” [Wink-wink!] “while I search that office he’s in.”

“Shore! ’Cept. I don’t wanna do nothin’ ’ld get Mr. L ’rested.”

“Nah-nah-nah,” the blonde Bunny waved her hands as drunk people do to insist too much. “I—Di’n’t I say?—Iss not him, ’s ’bout the other one . . .”

“Wha—?”

“I jes’ . . . Di’n’t I jes’ say it—Wha’s-his-name?”

“Falswell?”

“Yeah—Wait, no! The OTHER other one . . .”

“Who you mean?”

“My man, er, perp . . . Um. Ih’ll come back to me. Think ’ begins wi’ an ‘H’ . . .”

“. . . What’re we talkin’ ’bout?”

The two strippers sat, their hands on each other’s bodies, J.J.’s head resting on Bunny’s bare shoulder, for a moment in deep perplexity.

“I ’member!” shouted Bunny. The other smiled at her expectantly. “I need YOU to ‘distra’t’,” [Wink-wink!] “Mr. False-swell . . .”

“Uh-huh?”

“So I can search that (hic!)—that office he’s in.”

“You wanna I fuck ’im?”

Bunny nodded eagerly, even laughing for joy.

The two approached the door to the office Falswell currently occupied. As he said he would be, he was on the phone: “. . . If I ever get my hands on that bitch cop who blew up my nose . . !”

J.J. knocked on the door.

“Yeah? Whattaya want?”

“Hey, big-boy,” the silky-voiced whore said from the door, and she undid the lacy crimson ribbon that was all that was keeping the red sheer negligee she was wearing tied together in front; as expected, this caused her big black boobs to pop out.

“Ah! And I see you brought a friend!” Falswell hung up the phone, conspicuously without saying goodbye, almost as though there was no one on the other end, and he’d just been engaged in a pretend conversation. “But you said she doesn’t do full serv?”

“Yeah, but she couldn’t pass up a dance for THE Mr. Falswell.”

“Ah! So you’ve heard of me?”

Bunny nodded, pulling down as she slinked over to the seated man the front of her own blue sheer nighty.

“Well!” the crabby man’s nose had slipped to a strange angle the moment he looked up at the door; he set it aright: “What have the whores here been tellin’ ya—’bout how big my dick is, or what? ’Cuz it’s really big!”

J.J., pretending to turn to her friend to nod her smiling agreement, in fact, when her face could not be seen by the federal agent, rolled her eyes, and mouthed the words “Like a thimble!”

“I heard,” Bunny turned round, the better to slide her fine-fine butt up and down Falswell’s knee, “you’re real close to our boss Mr. L.”

“Yes. He owes me—big time. In fact, he owes me so much (heheheh!) you could almost say, he’s not your boss—I am!”

“I don’t get it,” with a sleepy-seductive smile, Bunny pushed her big boobs predictably next into the seated man’s face; “What’chya do for him—he owes you so much?”

“I sure as hell didn’t stick my tits in his face, if that’s what you mean. God! I’ll never get over how the stupidest of all drugged-up strippers thinks she needs to have the lowdown on every damn detail of her boss’s professional relationships . . .”

“Iss not wha-chya think . . !” Bunny looked afraid that her prying had blown her cover.

But rather than being angry, as he had sounded, it turned out Mr. Falswell was instead highly amused. He laughed heartily: “I’ll tell ya’, if you wanna know—What do I care if some sex-addicted floozy knows what I haven’t told anybody else!: like all conspiracies, mine starts with the government. I work for a top secret agency there, and, as of two years ago, so did your boss, Mr. Lamarck. He went then by the name Foster. However, somethin’ happened to him, I’m not exactly sure what. He was on a real big case, investigating the elusive whereabouts and identity of one P.M. Numero Uno, the Public Menace foreseen by President Nixondamus, believed to be somehow or other single-handedly responsible for every single crime ever committed in this country—he never DID find him, as far as I can tell. But after that investigation, he just suddenly went off the grid. Until, that is, I found him, stumbled upon him, really. I am, in short, the only person who knows Mr. Lamarck’s true identity, and as such, I am a significant liability to him; I’d even be worried for my safety—your boss has a reputation of making people disappear—except we’ve been able to hammer out a mutually beneficial working arrangement. Still, I’ve got this little ace in the hole, y’see? Anytime I think he’s spoiling on me, or I just don’t like the terms of our arrangement, want to work out something a little cushier, all I have to do is threaten to squeal to my higher-ups that your Mr. L.’s no other than the disappeared so-called ‘Bananas’ Foster—heeheeheehee! If he doesn’t want to get thrown in one of those overseas federal ‘holding cells’—ha, ‘holding cells’!, that’s rich!—he’ll never see light o’ day again! In short, he has to play ball, and by MY rules!”

J.J. gave her bosom buddy a look—while both were kneeling on the floor before Falswell, each stroking up and down with their hands a different one of his legs, including and not limited to stroking the lap of his pants—clearly saying, “See—a thimble!” But she said aloud: “C’mon, big-boy, lemme take you to a private room; my pussy needs you in me!”

Adjusting his nose, Falswell allowed himself to be guided by the black stripper out of the room, leaving Bunny alone in the office. Not bothering to pull the top of her blue negligee back up over her big boobs, Bunny commenced searching the room.

She began with the laptop on the desk at which Falswell had just been sitting. She tried to log in. The preliminary screen asked for a password. Bunny typed in “Falsewell”, then “Gulie”, then “Milky Waits” [sic, sic, sic]. She closed the computer and opened a drawer in the desk, found some pencils, pens, paper clips. There was a small cylindrical metal garbage can by the desk. She poured its contents onto the floor and, kneeling so that her butt was in the air, her knees touched, but her feet splayed behind her, she combed through the refuse. Finding very quickly something gross, the undercover detective made an “icky!” face, and abandoned her search of the garbage.

In a filing cabinet against the wall she found a trove of old porno mags. She opened one at random, flipped a few pages, suddenly stopped. She turned the magazine lengthwise, allowing to release in the process a fold-out page. Her eyes scanned the three-page fold-out up and down, then down and up. She heard a sound outside, blushed, shut the magazine without reinserting the fold-out page, and shoved the magazine back into the filing cabinet. She hid, then, kneeling behind the desk just as a man—B.T.—walked by the open door of the office, stood in the doorway a second, then walked on.

Still behind the desk, Bunny opened a drawer of it she had overlooked before. She pulled out a manila filing folder, lay it open on the desk before her. She looked over the first document in the folder, her eyebrows scrunching as though she were having trouble making sense of what she saw. She picked up the document, held it close to her face; then she pulled it farther away from her face; finally, she shook her head, put the page back in the folder. With a highly bewildered expression, she rummaged through the remaining documents before her.

All at once, she stopped; she was leaning over the desk, both hands on the desktop, as if to keep herself steady, her head bent to stare down at the current page below her. She lifted her face, a faraway look in her eye. She lifted a hand to her forehead, and expressed a gasp; sliding the hand down her face, she paused to let it hang on her bottom lip, then slowly let it slide down the rest of her body, until it reached the front of her panties; it inserted itself there. Bunny’s hand began digging at something, then, vigorously.

“Hey, Buns-baby! Looks like YOU’re havin’ fun!” the interjection came from the door, caused Bunny nearly to lose her balance from the shock; she wrenched her hand from her panties, slammed the file folder closed.

“I-I wuzzin . . !”

Ack! didn’t seem interested in her fellow-stripper’s excuse: “We’as ’bout to do one las’ roun’ o’ shots ’fore headin’ outta Lezzy’s for the afferparty—you cummin’, ’ what?”

“In a sex—sec!”

“Where’s J.?”

“She’s distrac’—er, she’s, y’know, like—‘with’ False-swell.”

“Then she won’t be long . . .” and the fat-titted Latina mouthed the same exact words concerning the man’s penis as J.J. had done.

When Ack! had left, Bunny reopened the folder again and flipped through the documents as if at random. She landed on one that was obviously a letter. She ran her finger beneath the words at the top of it, “Dear Darwin”.

“Ah-ha!—Gotcha!”

Bunny folded the paper up into a very small bundle, and slid this into the front of her blue panties. Then, leaving the file open where it lay presently on the desktop, she tottered back towards the bar. No sooner had Bunny stepped through the office door, B.T. grabbed her arm.

“’S not how-ih’ looks like!” Bunny expelled.

“Been lookin’ all over for ya’!” B.T. said; he shoved something into her hand. “Here!”

Bunny looked at it, uncomprehending.

“It’s the boss’s invite. If you wanna go, you should get changed. There’s a new dress and some jewels backstage, under a card with your name on it. And hurry: limo’s ready to leave.”

SCENE FOUR: Nighttime. Lamarck’s mansion, Bad Town.

The white stretch limousine pulled up to the well-lit portico of the big mansion. Three girls stepped out of limo, all wearing expensive and all the same slutty dresses.

“So big . . .” ogled the blonde of them, staring up wide-eyed at the house before her. She wore big diamonds around her neck, so large and so many, one wondered whether it were uncomfortable for her to bear so heavy a burden above breasts themselves must have entailed some hefting—if so, however, she didn’t show it, either with respect to her jewels or her juggs. She held her chest it seemed the higher for the added burdens, so it wasn’t difficult to ascertain the pride she took in both, which almost caused her to pop out of her skin-tight gown, which was black and sparkly, with bolts of spangled lightning succeeding much better than the designer had planned in highlighting her signature curves—a not difficult task in itself, the gown being conspicuously strapless.

Beside her was the Asian, who, now standing, revealed, in fact—although she was short—her breasts were in no danger for all that of brushing her kneecaps. They stopped midriff. She wore the same bedazzled smile of her blonde stripper-chum and a dress both less revealing and less classy. It came up to her neck, down to her crystal heels; however, it was skin-tone with leopard spots.

Behind her, that is, last to exit the arriving vehicle, was a nondescript brunette, and rest assured, only nondescript by virtue of all dramatic focus being robbed of her by the remarkable false blonde and boobily Asian. She was wearing green, a dress that shimmered; she might have been a lizard woman if her face didn’t say so resoundingly “please keep me!”; for the time, she would have to reserve any predatory instincts, perhaps for a later scene.

A young butler met the three at the portico. He wore a towel on his arm and made several gestures, his voice as though lost to the night. Inside could be heard a chamber orchestra warming up. The three women were evidently meant to follow the butler inside, and they did, holding back a moment only to whisper between themselves, smilingly, nervous, What awaited them within?

They passed into a chamber with a large staircase and red velvet wall-hangings, and from there into another chamber with a green frieze-topped billiard-table, the whole room as if wrapped in green, for it was lined with books, and so many of these, though not hardbacked in green, were so in complementary earth-tones which only brought out the rich greenness the more—like the color of grass is brought out on a gray day after rain; and from there into a largely empty room with elaborate gold wallpaper and a white wainscot up to waist-level.

Here they at last met their host.

He greeted them each solemnly, but did not stay motionless in doing so, ushering them the same time onto an adjoining patio. However, as they followed his lead, the guests became alerted to the presence of a naked woman, in black stiletto heels standing in the corner of the room. She was easy to miss at first, for her false-blonde hair, her pale skin, somehow blended into the gaudy wallpaper and high wainscot. She stood facing the wall, hands pressed to that, one leg lifted, bent at the knee. More interestingly, she stuck her butt out behind her—and so essentially at all in the room—in such a way as to show it off to even better purpose than it did naturally of itself—for it was that most remarkable of lady’s ass, both too mature and too youthful, too wide and too delicate, too soft, certainly, yet too firm, too. She possessed a striking resemblance to Bunny Blunderbusts, which perhaps explains the latter’s observing the woman longer than either of the night’s other two guests, as observes the figure before her one, who, turning through a door, happens on a funhouse mirror.

The woman in the corner smiled timidly over one shoulder as they passed by her: “Bananas-sir—I-I gotta pee . . .”

Their host ignored her.

On the patio, the host took the Asian in the leopard-print dress by the hand.

“Tell me,” he said—“Your name?”

“You mean, like, my dancer name?—er, Tia Titberg, sir—Mr. L, I mean—I mean, like, (teehee) whattaya want me to call you—Jeez, I REALLY like your place!”

“YOU can call me Darwin, my dear,” he kissed her hand, and then instantaneously grew cold to her. He turned this cold gaze onto Bunny, who stood just behind Tia Titberg. “You. And you,” he looked to the nondescript brunette some feet away from Bunny, and who was currently marveling at the inhuman junk of a naked Adonis statue on the patio—“You two, on the other hand, must not call me anything at all. You must not make a single sound, unless it is the grateful wordless expression of your satisfied lust. You are the Broken, and I have invited you here so that you may watch.”

He indicated a door catercorner the one they’d walked out of: “In there you’ll find meds, drink, and toys enough to satisfy your desires. But you are not to leave until I give you the sign. Do you understand?”

Both the blonde and brunette nodded slowly.

“And you,” Tia blinked excitedly at the man speaking to her. “This way.” He lead her through a door farther down the patio.

The nondescript brunette made herself at home. After snorting a line of Spank from a buffet table on which sat nothing save a huge pile of the pink powder and several bottles of champagne, she grabbed a vibrator from a nearby veritable weapons-rack of them and placed herself, legs splayed, on a richly-brocaded chaise-longue. The room they were in was very dark, no doubt to make it harder not to follow every move of the lovers in the adjacent room, the one that, lit only by a myriad candles, could be observed through the large, glass French doors connecting the two rooms.

“Hey, Niko—Wha-Wha-you think he mean, we’re ‘Broken’?” whispered Bunny to the other stripper in the room with her.

“WHIRRRR!” went the vibrator. The nondescript brunette was evidently a much better “good girl” than the undercover cop, kept her mouth closed but for soon to be let loose ecstatic gasps, just as instructed.

As there was only the one chaise-longue in the room, and no chairs besides, Bunny took a seat next to her masturbating friend.

“Ah!” gasped the friend. Bunny bit her bottom lip.

The chamber orchestra in the room with the lovers began in on a sonata of that almost unmelodious sort, dark, slow, and thoroughly woody. The musicians—well-paid, surely—kept improbably aloof of the sex act beginning in their midst, leaning over their instruments with professional intensity.

Darwin lay his hands on the trembling shoulders of Tia, turned her round to face the bed, and so her back was to him. Starting at the back of her neck, he unzipped her dress.

Without the woman’s removing her eyes from the adjacent room’s spectacle, Bunny’s hand, previously resting on the chaise-longue beside her, moved to her hip, then to her thigh, then up that to the hem of her skirt, almost at waist level. She licked her lips.

Women are the stuff of pure fantasy. A woman becomes smart, if such accords with masculine desire—and this concept is only ever to be understood relatively; the desire of a masculine female trumps that of an emasculated male, even though his desire is still his own, whereas hers is only by proxy. Likewise, if the masculine will desires her to be an empty vessel, no brains and all sex, so a woman shall be; but there are some basics to keep in mind for all aspiring mind-controllers: first off, she needs to be fed (always feed your sluts); second, her attenuated will on occasion will resurrect itself—to crush out her will entirely is impossible and ultimately silly, as it would destroy in its being destroyed the essential grasp of eros; finally, when she is good, she must be rewarded with joy unsurpassing. This is less a law of the universe than a matter of aesthetic principle; anything less is unworthy of a master.

The little Asian’s dress was down about her waist, and as she wore no bra, her girthy top parts were naked to the candlelight, curiously orbical and almost golden. The man holding her by the shoulders turned her around once more, so now she faced him. He applied soft pressure to her shoulders, by which she might infer she was meant to get down on her knees. Her eyes rarely leaving his, she obeyed the inference, began loosening his pants.

The bysitting Bunny gasped.

“It’s so . . .” she barely whispered the words.

“UNH!” cried out crudely the woman in the green scaly dress, having her first of consecutive orgasms. Bunny shot her masturbating friend a jealous look.

Tia’s face could no longer be seen from where Bunny sat, as it was buried in the naked dick-space of the standing Darwin Lamarck. All the same her head could be observed moving back and forth, in the manner of a woman giving an eager blowjob. And so it continued doing, until Darwin raised the woman to her feet once more, but now only to lay her down the next moment on the bed behind her. He slid the dress down her hips, over her feet, revealing thus the woman wore no panties. He climbed atop the bed himself, straddling the lying woman with his outstretched arms, easing himself into her.

Bunny’s hand was now buried shamelessly in her crotch, the look on her face the same as that look she’d been caught in having while in her search of the office earlier in the night. Like then, Bunny was soon called out of her reverie by a spy. A grunt reminded her that she was not alone; her masturbating friend had switched positions, so she now sat adjacent the woman, facing the glass French doors. Bunny held the hand she’d been just digging with to the face of this nondescript brunette. The latter had removed the vibrator from her pussy. She slid it between Bunny’s legs. Bunny, a look almost of protest on her face, suddenly abandoned that look; the two women on the chaise-longue kissed.

SCENE FIVE: Partner’s house.

SCENE SIX—Afternoon. Hall of Records, downtown Los Bonum.

Flopsy looked up into a bathroom mirror after having just snorted a line of Spank off the sink counter. She looked beautiful. True, a redness traced the outline of her eyes, her expression suggested she’d rather be anywhere else, her matchless cleavage sagged open a little more than was “smart”; she also looked youthful but with a sorry dark sag to her cheeks—one hoped that would clear up quickly, maybe with a good night’s rest.

It appeared for a second that, by looking in the mirror, she had caught something of the same concern of the more impartial observer. Her expression grew almost worried. But it wasn’t her cheek or her eyes or that little bit of blow left glaringly pink on the edge of her nostril she at last “touched up”, but merely her cleavage—she “poofed” it, essentially, so it stuck out more smartly in her present costume: another business-style skirt suit, this time with “rack-star” wielding black suspenders in place of the more typical suit jacket.

Her heels against the mosaic-laid floor of the lobby of the Los Bonum Hall of Records resounded noisily. The place was not deserted, but neither was it busy, and the foxy lady got few looks, fewer admirers, as she passed. She opened the door which on its window had the words printed: “District Attorney’s Office”, and entered.

The secretary caught Flopsy’s wandering attention with an abrupt: “Hello?”

“I’m here to see . . .” she paused. “Is Nerval Ramensky . . ?”

“One moment please,” said the woman behind the desk. She dialed a number into her phone. “And who shall I say is here to see Mr. Ramensky?”

“Fl——Bunny!” Fl-Bunny blurted.

“Bunny?” the secretary gave the fake blonde a quizzical look, but then shrugged her eyebrows at her as if to say, “Fine, be that way!”

“Hi, Hon- , er, THERE!” Nerval said, smiling uncomfortably and putting the phone down as his wife strode into his office a few minutes later. He shot a nervous smiling glance at the secretary who’d just acted guide to his wife, and as she pivoted to return to her desk, Nerval rose from his, walked to the front windows of his office and both lowered and closed the brown blinds. He smiled again at his wife, whispering nervously to her: “Didn’t I tell you—what are you—really!—HERE?”

“Bunny”, for her part, seemed not to hear this last from her husband, sat down in a chair in front of his desk so unceremoniously it was almost with an audible “plop”. She did seem a bit distracted in general.

“I,” she began, paused to collect herself. “I. Need your help . . .”

“What is it?”

“I need . . .” his wife so obviously spaced off at this juncture that Nerval surrendered her a pitying look.

“This must be about,” maybe it hurt him to suspect she was so completely gone, but whatever the reason, instead of calling light to the obvious, he opted to act as though all were more or less natural. He resumed his seat at his desk; “that informant I told you of the other day, the one who’s going to help our case against Darwin Lamarck.”

His wife’s eyes lit up: “That’s it!”

“You wanted his location . . .”

His wife nodded eagerly.

“Why was that again?”

His wife didn’t answer his question but at least she didn’t space off this time: “Gimme the address, Nerv!”

“Uh. Yeah. I been thinking about that . . . What exactly do you hope to learn from him?”

“He might help me . . .,” she was obviously searching her mind. “He might . . . Just . . .”

“Look, dear, I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“You—You don’t wanna help me?”

Nerval pursed his lips: “It’s not that—I would love to help you, help you in any way I can in. Didn’t I get you that fake ID, that apartment in Bad Town, pay for those . . ?” he waved a hand, his eyes searching the ceiling. “But if I gave you his address, I feel like that would be betraying client-attorney privileges. Regardless of if it would endanger him or not, giving you that information would violate my promise to keep his location a secret.”

His wife grew despondent. But perhaps that was on account of other things than what her husband had said. Besides having this meeting with him, she was the same time, too, rubbing one hand up and down the side of her tight business skirt, and as if completely unaware she was doing it, although she was doing it with increasing avidity. Nerval again flashed her that youthful, hopeless look of concern.

“Are you feeling okay, honey?”

“YES . . !” “Bunny” responded in so unexpectedly moaning a way, Nerval sat upright in his chair.

“Do you . . . You hungry?”

His wife merely flashed her tongue at the query—unclear if deliberately or otherwise—still staring through her husband.

“I’ll get you some water—or would you prefer coffee?”

“I’d prefer . . .” “Bunny” at last seemed to see Nerval. She looked very sleepy that moment, but a smile appeared at the side of her mouth: “You don’t have anything harder do you? I could really use a drink.”

“It’s not even noon yet, Flops.”

Flopsy shrugged, as if this news meant nothing to her. “I like tequila, but I’ll take a beer, or whatever you got.”

Nerval spoke cautiously: “I do recall we had some champagne left from that office party last month. Maybe I could ask Jewel . . .” He rose and walked to the door. “I’ll be back in a secky.”

Left in Nerval’s office by herself, Bunny began rubbing herself more ardently still. Her hand seemed to hold a special fascination for her hip and left buttock, which she squeezed through her skirt and to which she delivered more than one sharp, swift, occasional smack. After one of these, she moaned louder than was probably appropriate in a workplace, sliding forward in her chair as she did so, resting her elbows on her husband’s desk in front of her, and somewhat oddly holding her knees open and down toward the floor, a little perhaps like she wished to give birth. This spell passing, Bunny lay her head swooningly down on her arm, itself resting on the desk. Her eyes were closed, but when they opened, they took in something beneath them. On the desk under her arm was a notepad on which was written: “New safe house for Jimminaiah Hobbes”, followed by an address.

A quick look over her shoulder at the door of the office, Bunny grabbed for the pen adjacent the notepad, lifted her skirt till it was higher than the tops of her dark stockings, and copied to her thigh in ink the address. No sooner was she done, she shimmied her skirt back down again, “plopped” once more into her chair, began sucking the end of the pen and swinging her top leg (legs folded at the knee), all as if to belie any suspicion she’d been just up to something. However, her husband did not return immediately, and there was a strange minute or more of her waiting, sucking the pen, fidgeting in her chair, and making furtive glances at the door. At last, she stood up impatiently and snuck to the door, opened it a crack and looked out. A second after doing this, she darted back to the chair. This time she managed to stay there until her husband returned.

“Couldn’t find the champagne,” her husband said, “but I did find this one old wine cooler . . .”

“I—Thanks, but—Just ’membered—Gotta go!”

“That’s probably for the best.” Ever the gentleman, Nerval walked his wife out of the office, or obviously meant to, except his wife was so determined to leave now, she practically ran out, which made Nerval’s appear a very lagging escort.

“Who was that?” asked the secretary when Bunny had gone.

“Heh?” Nerval agonized a moment. “My—a friend of my wife’s.”

The secretary did a skeptical thing with her eyes.

Back in his office, Nerval cracked open the wine cooler and took a swig from the bottle, shaking his head as he did so: “Calling my own wife a friend of my wife’s—weirdo!” he muttered to himself after the drink. Then something caught his eye. On the blue-carpeted floor, between the desk and the chair his wife had been sitting in, was a darker blue stain the size of a silver dollar. He put his fingers on it, puzzled a moment: “Wet,” he said.

SCENE SEVEN: Afternoon. Safe house, Bad Town.

“I don’t remember ordering no stripper-grams. Who the fuck you?”

Flopsy stood on the doorstep of a rundown house in a rundown neighborhood. She looked the same as she had at the D.A.’s office, except her hair was now down, mussed, and her face looked sweatier and more flushed. Before answering, she sniffled, wiped her nose.

“I’m naw here to answer quesshuns—’m here to ask ’em, scumbag!”

The informant, Jimminy Hobbes, stood in the doorway stroking a raggedy cat in his arms: “Wait—I know you! You’re that . . !” but before he said what, a look of terror crossed his face. “St-stay away from me!”

Putting his arms up to wave the woman away, he dropped the cat.

“Calm down—goddamnit!” Flopsy stepped into the doorway. “You wanna ’lert the whole neighbors?”

“No way! What’re you doing here! I’ve already turned squeal, you don’t need to —!”

With a look of consummate exasperation, Bunny socked Hobbes hard in the hands he had raised automatically to protect his face, causing him to slap his own face forcefully enough as to send him staggering back two steps, and then collapse onto his knees.

“I want answers, Asshole!”

“Okay-okay—I’ll tell you any answers you want!” He was bleeding.

“’ Wanna know . . .” perhaps in the physical exertion Bunny had suffered an influx of sensation courtesy in part to her latest Spank fix, but whatever the case, she grew rather glassy-eyed of the moment and seemed to struggle to find her next thought.

“If this is about Lamarck—I already told you. I squealed everything I know to the D.A.!”

“Not him,” she seemed to recall herself. “Um. ’Bout APIS!”

“APIS—the shit, man, what the fuck I know about APIS?”

She almost kneed him where he was kneeling, but he dodged in time, trying to placate her:

“Okay—I’ll tell you whatever!”

“I wanna know if Lamarck’s APIS. An’ if Darwin’s APIS . . .”

The informant looked puzzled, but no doubt in consideration of not getting hit again, replied quickly:

“Yeah, sure, man—Lamarck’s APIS!”

“Is he?” Bunny sounded so surprised at this answer, perhaps it was that brought the informant to regret having given it.

“Don’t you want him to be?”

“. . . So, like, what—you’re naw sure?”

“I —” the informant studied Bunny’s face. “I guess I’m not ENTIRELY sure?”

“Uh-huh,” Bunny practically grunted this assent, as though the answer pleased her. “But, like—how ’ I fin’ out?”

“Um . . . You know, it’s just a rumor, but on the street they say you can always spot an APIS guy by this tattoo he gets, sort of like a segment of DNA. It’s called a double-helix.”

“Where-zit?”

“You mean, where on his body? I have no idea, man, but please don’t hit me.”

Bunny thought this tip over carefully; or so she appeared to do; she stood silently staring off for almost a minute. Then she found a towel and tossed it at the bleeding man. “Clean yerself up. ’ An’buddy asks—you never saw me.”

“Got it.”

“An’,” she withdrew a card from her purse. “’ An’thing else you ’member, contac’ me shtraigh-way.”

“Right-right—I . . . Hey! this address is Bad Town! You’re just two blocks from here!”

Bunny emitted that scoff noise had made her husband wince.

“What’s a lady-cop doin’ in Bad Town of all places?”

“Don’t,” Bunny paused significantly, “get too curious, punk.”

“All right. But—Your alias is ‘Bunny Blunderbusts’? DUDE—seriously! That’s even a dumber name than Flop —!”

The informant didn’t get to finish this time, for he had failed in his wonderment over the card to evade Bunny’s incoming kneecap.

SCENE EIGHT: Night. The Milky Weights.

Naked, Bunny came off stage a-sweat from another dance. Behind her could be heard the sound of loud ovations. She walked straight over to the vanity mirrors, where stood the dancer Niko—whom we called, unjustly, a nondescript brunette; she did in fact possess a very remarkable profile, one well worthy description, but only when seen, as Bunny currently saw it, from behind and the woman herself in a thong, specifically.

“There ’nuff for one for me?” asked Bunny.

Niko said nothing but selflessly cut the long line she had just laid out for herself in a very fair half. First, Niko, then, Bunny, pinching a nostril, snorted up her share of the pink powder off the vanity table. Niko coifed her hair, touched up the makeup on her eyelids, and wiped her nose—nervous gestures of a user anticipating her latest hit’s taking. Bunny, after her snort, licked a finger and rubbed the table where the powder had been, collecting this way as many stray grains of the stuff as she might and rubbing these on her gums and especially her tongue.

“Iss, like,” she began, philosophically, a finger still in her mouth, “wish I’d knew ’bout meds before—Haven’t felt so good in my skin since ever.”

Her hit having evidently took, Niko turned to her fellow dancer, but without looking in her face or responding to what she said, she began at once and aggressively to suck the other’s tits.

“Buns! We got ’ request for a double dance,” J.J. had just run back to the dressing room. “What you say, girl? You in?”

“Mmm? Cum-Coming.”

“Where’s the john?” Bunny asked as the two friends made their way back to the private rooms.

J.J. laughed her melodious laugh: “Haven’t seen him, girl. Wants to remain ’nonymous. The request was signed only ‘Secret Admirer’.”

This seemed to excite bunny, or at least she giggled nervously when she heard that.

“You think . . . All he wants ’ a dance?” By the way she said this, Bunny might have been experiencing jitters of excitement or jitters of anxiety at the prospect. Her friend inferred the latter.

“Bet not! B.T. said our man lay down enough dough to do us both diesel three times over. What do you say, girl? You in for a new experience?”

“Um . . .” Was it a look of temptation, a look of fear, or both Bunny gave her friend now?

“Look,” said J.J., holding her friend up a moment so she might speak to her so, pragmatically. “Why don’t ya, like, join me for the dance—nothin’ we haven’t done ’fore . . .” the stripper rubbed her friends arm and purred her words. “And if, like, when our secret admirer shows hisself, you’re uncomfortable, you can leave; just like with Falswell, I’ll take it from there . . .”

“’Kay!”

When they’d entered the private room, J.J. pointed to a mirror.

“The john—he’s behind there.”

“You mean—he can see us?”

“But we can’t see him!” affirmed the black stripper. “Nervous?”

“A little . . .”

“Just follow my lead.”

As J.J. began her striptease, Bunny glanced timidly in the mirror. She watched her own reflection, the beautiful black dancer clutching close her body, sliding her sweaty form against Bunny’s more sweaty one; Bunny’s shyness dissipated. A lustful look suffused her. She was moving her body too now, more slowly than J.J.’s, but as if in complement to it, as though the two bodies were talking.

J.J. had soon rolled off the meager thong Bunny had put on after her last dance. Bunny displayed shock at how quick the other’s tongue found itself between her legs. She laughed with surprise, her good humor breaking for a moment the stifling spell of eros; but the dancer was promptly brought back in line, which is to say, she submitted to her own arousal, her brief fit of nervous laughter her last.

She gasped: “O god! I never . . . this good . . . O—fuck!”

What brought these words to her lips just then? One might surmise it had a deal to do with her knowing she was being watched.

By now Bunny looked a different woman than that one who showed hesitation, nervousness but a moment ago. There was still an anxiousness to her expression, but it was the anxiousness not of fear but of expectation.

The secret admirer stepped out then from behind a curtain near the mirror.

Bunny: “I was hoping it would be you.”

“Really? How come?”

“You’re . . .” though her original meaning had needed little explanation, she seemed to find it hard all the same to give one: “You’re just better at it, than others . . .”

“Better at what?”

Bunny tried to laugh but couldn’t, a self-conscious expression on her face. She turned abruptly to exchange a long open-mouthed kiss with J.J., who, with her hand between Bunny’s legs, was all the while writhing her fit ebony body up and down the other’s naked white one. The secret admirer pulled Bunny’s face away from J.J.’s.

“Tell me: What is it I’m better at.”

With that singularly hopeless yet aroused elocution of women, wherein it seemed she felt ridiculous at only being honest, and felt good at feeling ridiculous: “Sex.”

“How badly do you want it—sex—with me—right now?”

Bunny lost all self-consciousness with the passion of her next statement: “Mmm! Wannit so BAD!”

“What would you DO for it?”

That must have struck her as a strange question. She seemed to come to a little from her erotic reverie.

“Whattaya want me to?”

“I want you to look in my eyes—see me for who I really am.”

The man lifted a hand and with astonishing ease removed the distracting mole from his cheek.

“That’s right, Bunny—or should I say, Detective Botchek?”

Before her stood HER MAN—the same perp she had almost arrested the night of the sting at the Fixxx!

“How’s-zit . . ? Why’d I never recka-nize you?”

“A combination of this mole, the drugs you’re on, and what I can only imagine is your own stupidity. But don’t feel too bad; my disguise fooled that dolt B.T., too; and he’s known me as his boss’s partner for years!”

“But . . .” But, indeed—for the dancing J.J. hadn’t ceased to gyrate and caress lovingly the undressed undercover detective. “How—How’d you know it’s me?” she managed to ask finally.

“I had my suspicions from the very beginning; that’s why I insisted on that private dance with you, even though it was your first night. I always disguise myself to check out the new girls—quality control. Usually, we give first-night girls a break, though. But you looked so much like that troublesome cop. However, even then, I admit it, I didn’t think an officer of the law would ever go so far undercover as to take on such huge tits. And when later the same evening, you literally prostituted yourself to me, that was when I concluded it couldn’t be you. But then, Juice here came out and spilled the whole thing to me—I didn’t even ask her to—one night we were fucking like usual, and she just out and says: ‘You know the newbie’s an undercover cop!’”

Bunny and J.J. exchanged a look. J.J.’s face was once more buried in Bunny’s muff, but her eyes staring up the other’s way, contained what might have been an apology. The meaning hid in Bunny’s eyes was a deeper mystery still.

“You—You’re gonna kill me?” asked Bunny.

“What do you take me for—a murderer?” ‘her man’ smiled enigmatically. “You’ve got no case against me—that’ll be clear to you soon enough. As for your snooping around here without a warrant, well, if that’s what gets you off, who’m I to complain, especially when you come bearing goods as good as this.” Her perp lay a hand undaunted on the dancer’s naked hip.

“Whattaya mean [Gasp!] I have no case?”

“Patience, detective. All will be revealed, but not tonight.”

“And—Tonight?” Bunny shuddered, presumably at the clever workings of J.J.’s tongue.

“Well, that’s up to you. What’s it going to be, detective?”

She didn’t answer, continued to pant in that way of one physically unable to make the move she wished after so much it felt like a need.

He lay his fingertips on her cheek, brushed them over to her lips. Her eyes were closed; as if unconsciously, she took one of his fingers into her mouth, sucking it. Then, slowly he lay the same hand on her bare shoulder. Just as Darwin Lamarck had done to Tia Titberg the night of Bunny’s first “invite”, the perp applied slight pressure to Bunny’s shoulder and she went down silently—the while looking as if transfixed into his eyes—onto her knees.

“You’re makin’ the right choice, Buns-ba-a-aby,” the last word practically rolled like chocolate-covered caramel off the black friend’s tongue, just before she stuck that in the ear of her white stripper friend. Again, Bunny said nothing, only, with a slightly scared glance up at the perp, lay her hand on the bulge in his pants.

SCENE NINE: Morning, LBPD HQ.

A lone whistle cut through the minor din within the LBPD HQ.

“Lookin’ good!”

“Is that—!”

“O MY—BOTCH!!!”

A self-conscious glance over one shoulder, a timid smile over the other, and finally, a not entirely convincing proud rearing of her cute silly little head, Flopsy dressed still as Bunny—in a ridiculous black mini and pink tube top, a red lip-stick kiss mark on very easily espied cleavage, her blonde hair in pig-tails—strode through the crowded main office and up to O’Manly’s desk.

“Well—How’d that letter I gave you check out? Chief ready to reopen the investigation?”

O’Manly spat out his coffee in comical surprise: “Botch—what ya doin’ here—I —!”

“I gotta text. You said we should meet.” She had a very overall guilt-ridden expression, seemed unusually articulate compared to when last he’d seen her, and the self-conscious glances she had sent over her shoulders when first she arrived, she continued to give, quite as though she were much more uncomfortable specifically there than ever before.

“I didn’t mean—Usually people text back.”

“Hubba-hubba!” A man with glasses who was incidentally small stepped up to the desk and began almost involuntarily rubbing the undercover detective’s hip as he spoke.

“Smalls, really! . . . I-I don’t have time for this right now.”

“You got time for it later, hot stuff?”

“Smalls!” barked Detective O’Manly. “The lady said . . !” But he was ignored by the other two.

“We could get a cup o’ joe, y’know—catch-up!” He hadn’t removed his hand from her hip.

“Heehee,” looking distracted, almost afraid of something or someone, Botchek shook her head indecisively. “Gimme a call or whatever,” handing Smalls a card from her purse. “Later. ’Kay?”

“You BET later!” Smalls departed.

“Wow, gotta admit . . .” O’Manly was staring unabashedly at Flopsy’s tiny black skirt, worked a little up in all Smalls’s unsolicited rubbing.

“What?”

O’Manly glanced around at all the other officers and detectives around them, all leering at the dainty morsel their fellow law-enforcer presented, looking less like policemen than a pack of wolves: “Hey, uh, why don’t we step in here? I’ll let you in on what I got.” She followed him into the familiar interrogation room.

“First off, about the letter: It’s no good. There’s nothing in it the least bit incriminating. It is literally just a letter from an associate of Lamarck’s, thanking him for picking up the check at a catered event, some sort of retreat . . .”

“But the name at the top—Darwin!”

“Well, that makes sense, right? It’s Darwin Lamarck’s office. So, yeah, it was a letter to him, and had his name on it.”

For reasons Flopsy didn’t bother to elaborate her face suddenly turned a crimson rather painful to witness.

“Um,” O’Manly continued. “Yeah, not a word about Falswell OR your perp Malthus.”

“Malthus!” Bunny said half under her breath, snapping her fingers.

“You mean,” O’Manly looked very thoughtfully, not because he was thoughtful, but because his repertoire of expressions was very limited and at least he’d successfully learned that one: “if I understand you right—. . ?” And then he trailed off, like he could see the situation would only get more uncomfortable between them if the topic was continued upon.

O’Manly cleared his throat.

“At any rate,” he went on hastily, “that wasn’t the big news I texted you about. You know that new bit of surveillance, the one Crouch and Flo were able to get from your chase last month? From that they got a good still of the perp, one not as blurry as last time. And here’s the thing—turns out it’s not Malthus in the still. They’ve positive ID’ed him as another guy.” O’Manly deposited a photo of the still on the green table before them. The man in this photo, indeed, was not Percy Malthus. “His name’s Spencer Herbert.”

At this bombshell, Botchek—contrary to all sane expectation—suddenly smiled, and then—even less acceptably—giggled with flushed cheeks and too evident joy.

“Are you okay, Botch?”

“O I feel, like, SO-O-O-O much better,” gushed the undercover brunette as she expressed a big sigh of relief.

“But—you know I can’t figure it. He was right in front of you that day of the chase. And yet you took one look at this photo we had of Malthus, and said he’s our guy!”

“Yeah . . .”

O’Manly threw the familiar photograph of Malthus—the one taken at his place of previous employment—down on the table next to the new surveillance photo. “Which one is it, Botchek? Which one did you see the day of your chase?”

“They DO look alike . . .”

O’Manly squinted down at the two images: “Yeah, but they’re clearly not the same person.”

They both stared silently at the two pictures for quite some more time, until at last O’Manly made a noise with his mouth like “Bwuh!” and shrugged noncommittally: “Guess anyone could make the same mistake.”

They stepped out of the interrogation room without saying a word else. When they were in the main office area, O’Manly touched Botchek lightly on the shoulder: “Listen, Botch—it took a lot of nerve goin’ in there to Bad Town like you did. Guess what I’m tryin’ to say is, maybe there’s more to bein’ a good detective than being a teamplayer. Hell, maybe we both have something we could learn from the other. Whattayasay? Wanna come back and be partners again?”

As they were shaking hands a loud hoot broke free of the far side of the office. The officer known as Ungers hollered across the way: “Does this mean you’re comin’ back, Botch!”

Flopsy turned to her admiring fellow officer and gave a sheepish, flattered nod: “Soon as I get, like, get some things . . .” She seemed a little spacey, incidentally, though not obviously intoxicated.

“Great!” returned Ungers, “but TELL me you’re keepin’ the cans!”

SCENE TEN: Afternoon. Bunny’s Bad Town apartment.

SCENE ELEVEN: Night. Lamarck’s mansion, Bad Town.

The familiar young butler answered the door, and ushered the fake blonde in the stained t-shirt and red booty-shorts into the mansion.

“One moment,” he said, with a slight tilting of the head. “Master Darwin is just finishing a session with one of his protogees. Would you care to wait in the drawing room?” The butler pointed to a room just behind the large staircase.

Slowly, Bunny walked alone into the room—the butler, after inviting her to wait, had shuffled off in the opposite direction—the expression on her face difficult to read: it might have indicated fear, anger, expectation, hunger. The so-called drawing room was a very large and rather open space, one side of which looked out by a wall of paneled windows onto the portico and the beyond loop-around driveway; the other side revealed an indoor arboretum through a pair of sliding glass doors. In two places on the walls on the other two sides of the room long bookcases stretched from the high ceilings to the floors. There was a large globe in a wood, stand-alone frame, several fine chairs around a hearth, and against the farther wall, an armoire desk with a computer on it.

No lights were on in the present room, but things were easily discernible by the light of what looked a kitchen on the far side, the well-lit antechamber Bunny had just passed out of, and the few lights from the driveway and even fewer ones from the arboretum. For that matter, the computer on the armoire desk was on, and perhaps it was the bright glow of the screen of this attracted Bunny to it.

She bent over the desk to look at the screen.

The images on it were very small, for it had what immediately appeared the live captures of some dozens of surveillance cameras. Her eyes focused in on the images of one camera in particular—it was at the Milky Weights, in a private dance room; one could just make out J.J. going down on some guy. But then, by her expression it was apparent—her brow creased—another image had caught her eye. She moved the mouse, clicked the tiny image; instantly it became larger. It was in one of the rooms of the mansion, the same master bedroom, in which, while she had watched, Lamarck had fucked her fellow dancer Tia. She could clearly see Darwin; his “progetee” was with him, a woman she had never met before—certainly very beautiful, but blindfolded, tied-and-bound to an odd frame, which kept her prone on all fours. She was naked but for the blindfold and black high-heels, which she wore on both her hands and her feet. The impression that she was less a woman than a horse was brought home the more by the presence of a frayed leather tail sticking out her ass, as well as Darwin’s currently slapping that same ass with a riding crop. He stopped when the familiar butler entered the room.

Bunny hit the escape button, the image became small again, and she backed quickly away from the computer screen. She bumped then into a very oddly dressed maid who had snuck up on her, though it was unclear whether deliberately or by accident. Surely, there was little odd in discovering a sexy French-maid in the mansion of pervert tycoon Darwin Lamarck—outwardly, she fit the type to a tee: first, she had big boobs and great legs; also, her skirt was much too short, the bust of her maid-gown much too low, and beneath her puffy bloomers one could see instantly she wore nothing besides. But what made this alluring menial unique was that her dress was pink and her stockings were pink and her high-heels were pink and her hair was pink and her eyeshadow was pink and her lipstick was pink to the point of sparkling. In fact, her lips looked more caked in something than anything, less painted than “paved”, as it were.

Bunny made a noise of shock, but the maid did not apologize, simply grabbed Bunny by the face, leaned in close to that with her own, and kissed her very hard on the lips. Quite likely, this turn proved so surprising, Bunny was at a loss for quick responses; but whatever her excuse, she did not fight the kiss, took it, though wide-eyed, passively, and when at last her face was let go and the kiss was ended, it was not by her own initiative, but by the very pink maid’s. The pink maid licked her lips. Unconsciously, Bunny did likewise. Then, reaching into her boobs, the pink maid pulled out a pink cylinder.

“Spank lipstick,” she explained, drowsy-eyed but obviously aroused. Her gaudy-thick lipstick HAD gotten mightily smeared in that stolen kiss, and so she reapplied it—which, to be fair, did little to correct for the smearing, only caked more on over that.

Bunny was now wiping her own lips clean with her fingers, then sucking those shamelessly for every last trace of the Spank. At last, she said:

“You don’t—you don’t have any straight—do you?”

The very pink maid winked and reached into her boobs again. Like a white rabbit to Bunny’s Alice, the maid then tossed her a small pink vial and practically hopped away, out the bright entrance that led to the presumable kitchen, and though very happily mumbling to herself, evidently without further thought for the visiting stripper—whom she had surprise-kissed it seems for no other purpose than that she had desired to do only this.

Bunny had just snorted up the line afforded of the small vial—snorted by an identical method as had J.J. that first night of her work, in a swift sniff of a damp finger—when the butler reappeared.

“Mr. Lamarck will see you now,” he said, predictably.

Bunny followed the man into the billiard-table room, the one lined with books.

In one side of the room, in a niche carved out of the surrounding bookcase, was set an old, small television set, with a built-in VHS player. There looked to be something rather ghastly playing on it; the images were not yet discernible, but it was instantly apparent that they involved gore. Before this television, in a green-upholstered armchair, Darwin Lamarck sat with his back to the approaching butler and guest. The butler led the undercover detective about halfway from the room’s entrance to the chair before giving Bunny a nod and then promptly exiting the room.

Bunny spoke up first: “You know, don’t you? You know what happened to . . ?” One wonders if she trailed off because she had forgotten his name.

“I know a good deal more than that, detective.”

“Why’d you do it?”

“It had to be done,” Lamarck said this with a sigh. “Your husband was getting too close to making a real case against me.”

“You leave my husband out of this! What —” Bunny stared at the TV. “What are you watching?”

“I was just about to turn it off. Believe it or not, I don’t enjoy watching this stuff. But in this case—do you recognize it?”

Bunny: “That’s downtown!”

“Very good, detective! In the background you can make out the view of the Los Bonum skyline, as seen from the sixty-seventh floor of the Goldbrick Industries building.”

“All those dead bodies—whose are those?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

Bunny hesitated.

“Let’s just say,” resumed Lamarck, in a very diplomatic tone, “this represents an alternative telling of your last month’s chase of my partner—Percy Malthus. As it happens, this is the REAL version, but, as it also happens, this is NOT the one anybody believes. I have written a story for you, detective, one in which you got your wish to be a super-cop, one in which the cost of your numerous excesses was cleverly hidden from, not just your own view, but essentially everyone’s.”

“I don’t believe you,” Bunny shot back defensively. “It doesn’t make any sense. And you couldn’t possibly . . !”

“What—Cover up an unintentional massacre? It was difficult, I admit, but, believe it or not, it WAS possible.”

“Why—Why would you do that?”

“You really don’t know?” There was a weird pause. Darwin was still seated with his back to Bunny. He got up and shut off the TV, turned around.

“It is your blindness, detective, that makes you inferior to me. You are happy to remain oblivious to your own evil, while others do not have this option. You are happy to let these others see the evil you do FOR you, so you don’t have to. This is nothing new in itself. It is in part what makes you so attractive to a man, your alluringly happy obliviousness. But a good woman must realize, at least in part, that she IS oblivious, otherwise she will never properly be grateful to her ‘daddy’, the man who has taken on perceiving that evil for her.”

“You . . .” Bunny seemed both confused and scared. “I know who you are! Falswell told me!”

“Did he?” indifferently, Darwin walked to a minibar, poured himself a glass of water from a carafe. “He is becoming quite a nuisance; I can see I’ll need to write an ending for him, too, soon. But perhaps you could be of use to me for that.”

“Never!” Bunny swung her arms before her wildly. “You’re not my ‘daddy’!”

“I never would’ve guessed that I was either, not before. I was like you, happy to live in a paradise of fools. But then it was revealed to me how a woman longs for nothing in life so much as to be absolutely dominated by the will of a man. The truth of it is so heretical to everything I was taught and wanted to believe, I could never have believed it—except that I saw it, and then couldn’t not see it, though, for a time, I gladly would have . . .”

“What’re you even TALKING ’bout!”

“You, detective. I’m talking about you. Shall I play us another video?” Without waiting for her to reply, Darwin ejected the first VHS tape and put in another. In a couple seconds a movie began in medias res. It was of the other night, Bunny, J.J., Malthus—the Milky Weights.

“Turn it off!” shouted Bunny, covering her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” Darwin spoke softly. “No one has to know. You don’t think I went to all the trouble I did to make you a super-cop, just to turn around and disgrace you, do you?”

“But,” she lifted her eyes from her hands. “Why, then? Whattaya want from me?”

“It’s what YOU want that I’m interested in uncovering, that is, uncovering for you yourself to see,” Darwin said. “I’m surprised you haven’t seen it yet already—it hides in such plain sight, the truth, it always does; perhaps that’s what makes it so hard to believe.”

“What truth?” there was a commixture of forced contempt and honest curiosity in how she asked the question.

“The truth of what you really want. It’s even in the way you approach your police work, detective, particularly in all the ‘extra’ work, you throw into it, ostensibly to prove ‘women are equal to men’, or however the old farce of egalitarianism is being carted about these days. An endearing characteristic, the over-achieving one, surely; but in your case—but not JUST yours—the over-achiever in you is so clearly a deceit by opposites. The truly perverse thing in your so-called ‘desire’ to be the world’s greatest cop is that that is in fact the last thing in the world you really want to be. It’s an elaborate disguise to hide from yourself and others that you’re not at all happy as a ‘momma’s-girl’, not at all content to be a dominant force in society—in fact, you’re not even able to be this, an irony I suppose you implicitly understand, or why your infrequent displays of desperate passion?—for you wish only in your heart of hearts to be dominated, to be the good daughter of a domineering and even severe—even evil—‘daddy’. One selective—who loves you, but not everyone. This is the law of privilege and it applies equally to man and woman; it begets the intensest of all forms of happiness, and so a happiness no woman, given the option, would live without, as women are foremost creatures of passion; a man may take or leave passion, as he chooses, but in pushing it aside he risks fostering that vindictive part of his character—the onus of patriarchy, the vindictive trait—and so he may become a much worse creature even than a wicked one. But you look tired; please, sit down.”

He motioned her to the green-upholstered chair. Looking helpless, Bunny followed his command.

“I quite like your performance on this one,” he pointed to the TV. “I have saved several of your private dances—but this is far and beyond my favorite. Just look at the way your eyes follow the motions of Juice, there, as though you were hypnotized. I’ve seen a lot of sluts, detective—as you might imagine a man of my profession must have—but rarely one so desperate to be broken as yourself.”

“Broken,” Bunny echoed, glancing from the TV to Darwin back to the TV. “You called me that before. That night . . .”

“There’s nothing to fear, detective,” Lamarck lay a hand on Bunny’s shoulder, gently. “No one’s going to find out what a broken little girl you are. This will be our little secret. We’ll keep it between you and me. No one else has to know that, inside, you’re a broken little slut, who wants nothing more than to be owned by one who lusts to possess, but not to respect you. The outside world will never suspect this in you, they will see only what I let them see, they will see a competent professional—no, more than that, a SUPER professional. Only you and I will know the truth. A truth all your life you’ve known, but have been afraid to admit; all your life, you’ve had to hide something, to cover up what you really are; but not any longer, that is, not with me; now you can walk openly in life—singularly aware in this omni-mutual hiding—out of the closet. That has to be enough.”

All at once, with a passion wholly absent just a moment before, Darwin stooped down and kissed Bunny on the lips. Bunny did not pull away, and the kiss changed from a close-mouthed to an open-mouthed to that one kind of making out where it looks as though the aggressor in the tryst—in this case Darwin—wishes to basically eat the other’s lips off her face. By the end of this first caress, Bunny was evidently aroused, was kissing back, now Darwin’s mouth, now his cheeks, now his bare chest—he had a robe on, it had fallen open. She stood, Darwin’s hands shoved her back into the bookcase. On the TV could be heard her own moans mixed with the moans of J.J., the grunts of Malthus; a fine backing score to her voiceless panting now, Darwin’s quick assertive clearings of the throat.

Now Bunny was naked, now she was on Darwin’s bed. In the corner of the room, blindfolded, with a big red-ball-gag in her mouth, the beautiful woman-horse still lay strapped into her odd frame—she didn’t make a peep.

Time and time again, Darwin fitted Bunny to a pose, fucked her in it, released her; she cried out in a mad ecstasy, arms seeking him out, demanding his manipulating touch. The room seemed to be spinning round and round, only the bed was stationary, the two lovers on it in ceaseless motion. Once more the face of the blindfolded, gagged horse-woman spun by; once more Bunny cried out in exquisite orgasm.

The candles were out. Bunny looked up from the center of the bed, as though she had just awoken, into the dark room before her. All seemed a mess—not a blanket around her, not a pillow, her hair a big white tangly mare’s-nest. In the moonlight striking him courtesy of a ceiling of glass in the adjacent room, Darwin stared out an architrave that joined his bedchamber to the indoor arboretum. On his lower back could be clearly seen a small tattoo, a double-helix.

Darwin turned, approached the bed.

“What is it, my pet?”

She said nothing, stretched herself up on her arms, craned her face towards Darwin’s, kissed him.