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pack it up. Have ‘em all head to your place in the morning. I’ll be there, once I shake off my hangover. With a little luck, we’ll be gone before the Dogs cross the tracks.” She leaps onto me and there’s lips on my face, but I’m too busy being pissed off at myself to appreciate them. I pry her loose.
    “Now get out of here. I need to drink. And sleep.” She’s still grinning. I’m spiteful, so I decide to try and fix that. Just as they’re about to close the door , I make a pretty good point; “Don’t tell your neighbors it’s your brother’s fault all this crap is happening. They’ll be harder on him than the Dogs were.” That did it. Her smile is dead and buried. Good. Serves her right for suckering me into suckering myself into this.
    They head out, and I settle down. Three drinks in, and I smell jasmine. Uh oh. She’s here.

Chapter 5: Hate Is A Very Exciting Emotion. Haven’t you noticed?
    “Rita,” I manage. She walks through the door without knocki ng. She’s smiling, and my heart rate doubles. My pulse didn’t rise with Lime’s Dogs about to murder me, but she flashes those alabasters at me and I’m a hummingbird. I’m in trouble.
    She closes the door softly behind her, and looks me up and down, taking her time. I return the favor. Her feet start at the ground, and her legs end somewhere in the neighborhood of Heaven. But before they can get there, a slim green dress wraps them up tight, and I don’t think there’s anything in this world I hate more than that green dress. It climbs up the rest of her (with a little extra work to do it around the torso) before calling it quits just in time to let the world’s sexiest neck catch a breather before it has to prop up the world’s deadliest head.
    It’s not the eyes (green, and glistening, but not emeralds) or the li ps (red, and rich, but not rubies) that do it. It’s not even the skin (to call it diamond would be overselling diamonds quite a bit). It’s not even the auburn locks that ski down it and hang out on her shoulders sipping cocoa. It’s not even the lashes (silk wishes it was that soft). It’s the way she moves it; it’s a head the coasts wherever it’s headed, and only then if it feels like that’s where it wants to be.
    “Well, not to judge, but your old office was certainly nicer,” she says, and sits in my chair. For her, it doesn’t creak. It’s too smart to risk it.
    “Yeah, but it had that stink.”
    “What stink?”
    “Jasmine.”
    She glides through the insult; doesn’t flinch with anything except one stray eyelash. Maybe I imagined it. “I heard, my dear, that you had a little tete-a-tete with our friend Lime today. Any truth to that?”
    I strike a match, light a fresh smoke, and give her something that’s shaped like an answer. “For a given definition of truth, sure.”
    “ And what definition is that?” she asks, patient, leaning on my filthy table now. Resting her forearms on my crinkled up coat (and man, are all the other coats jealous).
    “A flexible one, if memory serves.”
    She glides through this one, too. “Well, I’ve always been flexible. But then I don’t have to tell you that, do I?” She’s sex and violence and everything wrong with the world, with most of what’s right with it thrown in for laughs.
    “You don’t have to tell me anything,” I glance at the papers on my desk, pretending they mean something. “I assume you want something?” I expect her to sit back in her chair. She doesn’t.
    “What, can’t an old colleague come by just to shoot the breeze?” she plays innocent better than a piano plays classical.
    “That all you came to shoot?” she doesn’t answer, but she winks and pulls her gun out of her purse. She tosses it in my tiny tin waste basket.
    “How many more you carrying?” I ask because I’m not quite as dumb as I look, although I get a lot closer when she’s in the room.
    She licks her lips, and pulls a little one from a strap on her left