Chapters

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3

Link locked me in the bathroom for a few hours that night. A good thing, too, on account of the high likelihood I'd have pissed myself if he'd kept me in that room with the stoic doing whatever it was they were doing. I couldn't hear much of what was going on, just Link whispering something to the stoic he'd been messing with and every once in a while some crackle like some live wires were exposed. I guess it was about midnight when he let me out. There was just one of the three wild ones left in the room. Link had taken the two from the mission to storage and fed the one he'd been keeping some creme brulee from the restaurant down the street. It was curled up under the night stand with a bunch of weird doodads I'd never seen before.

"You gotta be a bit curious, partner," Link said to me. I didn't say anything. I just sat on one of the beds as far from the sleeping stoic as possible. He started to give me some line about freak incidents and getting tracked by wild ones from old pheromones. I wasn't buying.

"You ain't been straight with me. Not one god damn day since I met you," I said.

"Shit, Sonny, I'm sorry. You scared me is all. How'd you think I'd react, you busting down the door with a couple wild ones hanging off you?"

"You damn near shot me, Link."

He sighed and sat down next to me. He still had the gun. It was right there in the back of his pants. He handed me a fast food taco he'd picked up on the way back from the storage unit. He started telling me this long story about one of his early hunts up in Oregon. Some rare breed was supposed to be running around the woods up there, except it was some forest preserve so guns were strictly prohibited. To think, if Link had been less brave, or less stupid, he might have got himself arrested and the delivery service wouldn't even exist. He said that he stalked the quarry two whole days and just before the sun come up on the third, there it was, staring at him from the other side of his camp fire. That should have been the end of him, but he walked away clean. And how?

"I can talk to them," he told me, "They can understand what I'm saying. I gotta keep it real simple, but if I do it right they do what I tell 'em."

I thought maybe he'd just lost his mind. Most folks, if they got into this line of work, they'd go crazy real fast. Naked Stoic Lesbians are scary as all get-out because it never feels like they're real. They don't walk like people, don't stand like them or breathe like them. Sure, in pictures they can move a man like high school crushes do, but when they're right in front of you, you can tell that something isn't right, isn't natural.

"You still haven't told me what's going on," I said.

"What you saw tonight, Sonny, I'm sorry about that. It's all just part of the process. I need to make it happen when I want it to, sort of like how farmers get their cows all on a schedule for milking. I'm getting close and when I've cracked it, I'm gonna be rich. We're gonna be rich, Sonny."

Here's the thing about that. See, we all think we're better than that. We all think we'd stop ourselves from doing stupid shit even if there's a fortune at the end of it. Yeah, but when somebody says those words, "We're gonna be rich", something just clicks in your brain.

"You won't be pointing guns at me from now on, right?"

"Cross my heart and hope to go sterile, Sonny. Now, about that pretty, little thing 'neath the night stand..."