Sandra was a really, really adorable woman with really good looks. She had a beautifully fit body and a pair of small but quite nice boobs with cute, slightly protruding, and very inviting nipples. Her butt was like a Red Delicious apple, and her skin was sweet-smelling and soft like velvet. Her little belly was actually the most appealing part of her. It was delicately shaped and accentuated her enticing thighs and the glaring sexuality of her groins in an extraordinary way. It made her look like a small baby seal cuddling lovingly into her mother’s body, which role, incidentally, I was supposed to impersonate. At least, I imagined it so. And our date would have been even more than this—I was sure about it—if only it had been real and I hadn’t fallen asleep shortly after taking a lightning-quick shower, shaving my beard, brushing my teeth, getting dressed, tidying up the room faster than a hurricane crossing the Caribbean Sea, and dropping on the bed for only two seconds to take an extremely brief moment of rest.

Totally depressed now, I turned my head to look at the nightstand, where I saw an open bottle of Johnnie Walker with a white rose tucked inside, just as Sandra had promised me. It made me grunt in frustration. Already reddish from overindulgence, the rose smirked at me, bearing testimony to my shameful disgrace and making me think of everything I had missed out on. As I swore at myself for my unfortunate mistake, I tried to think only about the sexual act the receptionist and I didn’t have and deliberately kept her futile attempts to wake me up out of the picture because I just couldn’t stand imagining her expression while leaving the room, disappointed.

I swore again and sat up in the bed, checking the time. The clock on the nightstand showed eleven twenty-two, but the second hand was stuck, so the reading was probably meaningless. Not far away from me, I heard Lara snoring, and it made me wonder how she even knew which room ours was. Weirdly enough, I didn’t see her in the bed, though. I could also sense a strange smell in the air—something that reminded me of cheap perfume far beyond its expiration date.

I slowly went to open the window and immediately discovered the traces my drunken assistant had left everywhere in the room. Firstly, she had rushed inside—probably very excited because I noticed a hole in the plaster behind the door where the handle had hit the wall. The door itself had obviously swung backward, but not all the way, and it was still ajar. Then Lara tried to perform a furniture slalom, but it was unsuccessful because all the “gates” were now down, marking her strenuous path forward. She had stopped in the middle of the room to throw up a bit and take a short rest, after which she had obviously lost her bottle near the bed, and while trying to find it again, she broke the coffee table. The poor thing lay tumbled beside the armchair, still wondering which way to go.

After giving up her search, Miss Rough Night continued her lonely journey, heading to the bathroom, but instead of walking, she crawled along the floor like a worm, leaving zigzagging marks of dirt on the carpet. Before reaching her new destination, the booze bag had stopped by the rubber plant beside the TV set and pissed in its pot because it looked like a toilet bowl to her. It was actually the reason for the funny smell in the room.

Eventually, after realizing her terrible mistake, my assistant did her best to get to the real toilet bowl and drop dead on it, embracing it with her head hanging inside. The bowl served as a resonator, spreading her snoring throughout the entire hotel and making it sound louder than a dying bear’s groan.

I puffed in disgust when I saw her and stepped inside to pull her out. I had to make a serious effort to get it done because her totally relaxed body weighed probably half a ton, and when my mission finally succeeded, I noticed her nose was wet. She was really lucky to be still alive! I held her by her arms and dragged her back along the floor toward the bed, and there I rolled her body, forgetting about her for the next few hours. I had more important things to do than babysit her.

Instead, I hopped into my clothes, grabbed the car keys, and left the room before the terrible smell killed me. As I walked down the stairs, I wondered whether I would meet Sandra in the lobby, and I kind of didn’t want to because I was still ashamed and had a terrible headache. Unfortunately, I had no other option. My only alternative route was climbing down the fire escape, which would have been too weird. Luckily, when I reached the lobby, the receptionist was missing behind her desk, and I tiptoed silently through the hall, running outside to the Ford. Then I drove to my place and headed up to do a few urgent things, undisturbed by fucking alcoholics.

Firstly, I took aspirin for my headache, showered to refresh myself, and tried to change my clothes. I say, “I tried” because there were no clean clothes in my wardrobe anymore and only a pile of dirty ones taller than me. Since I didn’t want to do laundry right now, I solved my little problem by picking those that looked only reasonably soiled and used the same method to choose garments for Lara. Knowing her sloppy style, I settled on a pair of dark khaki trousers and a grayish linen shirt, which were going to give her many more hours of happy playing in the mud.

After finishing the urgent chores, I moved on to digging out every clue I could find in my apartment that had anything to do with my stupid case. It wasn’t too much, actually. Except for the blue plastic bucket and the four empty bottles in it, I found a fifth one behind the couch in the living room, and it made me wonder what they were all supposed to mean. I just couldn’t accept the idea of having Sonya’s boyfriends over to my place for a whiskey party, so there had to be another explanation! Then I remembered the picture I had stuck to the cabinet door in my bathroom and went there to look at it again.

The place was clearly in the port area, but unfortunately, I couldn’t distinguish any details to narrow it down to a particular section or an unloading slot. The boat—a rusty container ship with a couple of lifeboats hanging on the starboard side—had cast an anchor just outside the harbor, but there was no one on its deck. It looked very much like those wrecks that traffickers used to hide their stuff in until they got the chance to move it to the shore. It definitely didn’t seem capable of even crossing the local bay one way, let alone sailing across the Caribbean Sea! On the side of its bow, in distorted yellow letters, it read Blue Grasshopper, and once again, I wondered what a stupid name for a boat it was.

I stuck the picture back to the cabinet door and hovered around my apartment for fifteen more minutes, but since I found nothing else interesting enough and felt terribly hot because of the working radiator in the kitchen, I eventually decided to leave. Besides, if I stayed here, I had to do so many household chores that I didn’t even want to think about them. For example, I had to do my dishes since they obviously didn’t wish to do them themselves; I had to launder my clothes because they had turned a blind eye to the mess they were in; I had to clean the floor; I had to take out the garbage; I had to put everything else in order; and I had to take care of a thousand things more! To summarize the situation, in my absence, total anarchy reigned in my house, but I just wasn’t ready to deal with it yet. Moreover, the only thing I really, really wanted to do—watch Tom and Jerry for an hour and relax—was impossible now because I had no cable TV, as it turned out. My company apparently disconnected it because I failed to pay the bill.

Highly disappointed and depressed, I moved the keys to my car, the gun, and the picture of Sonya with the scumbags from my old clothes to the new, and I walked out of the apartment, finishing only one chore on my checklist—namely, taking out the garbage. As I walked down the stairs, I thought about how fundamentally Lara had changed my life. I couldn’t even recognize myself anymore, and instead of being the tenacious and determined detective Murphy Mellrow, I had turned into the dorky clown Murphy the Great, who talked ridiculous bullshit and did tons of ill-considered stunts all the time. It was simply amazing what a woman could do to a man if he wasn’t strong enough to oppose her!

Since I had no idea how to spend the rest of my day, and nothing interesting popped up in my head during my walk down the stairs, when I stepped out onto the street, I headed to my car, hoping to come up with something while driving. Alas! As soon as I took the first step along the sidewalk, I realized it wasn’t the way to go. I had actually stayed up in my apartment for only an hour and a half, but in the meantime, the sun had already reached its zenith and spit deadly fire upon the Earth without remorse. It was madness even to think about entering the Ford. I was probably the only idiot—including among single-cell organisms—who had dared to come outside, and, obviously, the fact that I had been working in the wee hours lately had made me terribly naïve and even recklessly insane.

I suddenly stopped and looked around, uncertain. I was in a terrible dilemma: it was too hot to stay outside, but in my apartment, it was even hotter! After a short hesitation, I realized that my only chance to survive in this environment was to have a couple of ice creams right away, as well as a few lemonades. I sharply turned around and quickly walked to the nearby milk bar—the same one where Lara and I had met the bum with the basin for the first time—but before stepping inside, I hesitated again and thought maybe it wasn’t such a wonderful idea after all. The establishment was air-conditioned to a very low temperature, and the shock for my body was going to be immense—it would feel like getting out of hell and straight into a tank of liquid nitrogen! Nevertheless, since I had to act quickly, I walked in.

Right after I did it, I had to stop and open my mouth, snorting heavily. It was actually worse than I thought. I instantly broke into a sweat from the difference between in and out, and my body shivered uncontrollably to adapt. After a few moments, I dizzily walked to one of the miniature tables, which was clearly too small to contain even half of the ice creams I needed to consume, and I sat in one of the miniature chairs, which was too tiny to contain even one of my butt cheeks. Then, at last, I looked around worriedly.

Just like the last time we were here, the place was empty of customers, but unlike then, there was no one at all now. I could see neither the waitress with the fiery red hair and the huge fluffy bows nor my old bum friend. I had hoped to ask the latter a couple of questions because he obviously wasn’t such a dumbhead as his appearance suggested, and as for the former, well, I just longed to see her infant dress and childish yellow panties with a ladybird printed on the front.

Since time was passing and nothing was happening, and since I still hadn’t given up on my ice cream and lemonade, I decided to act the way Lara had acted when she faced the same problem on our previous visit here. That is to say, I started coughing loudly and fiercely—just like a junkie who was desperate to “cure his catatonic state by boosting his blood sugar”. I couldn’t shake all the furniture, as my assistant had done it back then, but at least the chair under my butt made a very mournful sound.

At first, nothing happened. Not only did the waitress not break her neck hurrying to serve me, but I also didn’t hear any rattling sounds coming from behind the counter. I had just decided to give it another try with the coughing and do it more convincingly this time, and I had just started taking a very deep breath when a strange vision appeared before my eyes not too far away from me. It was really just a vision at the beginning—it looked like a shadow slowly materializing out of nowhere—until it started moving toward me and gradually took the shape of a female creature.

The woman had raven black hair, a straight nose in the middle of an oval face with alabaster white skin, juicy lips with matte black lipstick on them, and a pair of hypnotizing green eyes, staring at me like a bird of prey watching a stupid little bunny jumping merrily on the meadow underneath. Her gaze actually gave her away. She was the same old waitress—the patron of the bum with the weird hat—but now she had a different look. She had a complete makeover!

My eyes involuntarily wandered down her body as she walked, absorbing every little detail. She was wrapped in a black, see-through tulle dress that waved surreally around her like mist, with which she reminded me of an ancient prophetess performing a mysterious ritual at the altar of her temple. The woman had a shiny silver tiara with an emerald on her head and a matching necklace around her neck. She didn’t wear a bra, and her heavy tits bopped magnificently beneath the transparent tulle, attracting the eye to their flat pink nipples, which were as round as a full moon.

The priestess made a few smooth, almost unreal turns between the small tables and chairs, and she finally floated up to me. A heavy sandalwood smell immediately hit me in the face, and its thick sweetness jellied the air between us. I had the feeling that if I tried to cut it with a knife, it would remain like this—sliced in half!

Eventually, the femme fatale opened her black lips, and I heard her heavy voice saying, “What can I do for you, stranger?”

All the windows in the milk bar rattled anxiously under her devastating contralto, and the floor beneath my feet shook as well.

I promptly braced myself to resist the impulse to run away and took a very deep breath, trying to sound like the Great Master of Evil who had come to conquer this world, now and forever. Unfortunately, my voice came out rather like Donald Duck in his overly excited state—when he gabbled almost unintelligibly. I wasn’t actually quite sure what I said, but it must have been something like, “I want strawberry and blueberry ice cream with walnuts, caramel, maple syrup, and chocolate sprinkles!”

Right after shutting my mouth, I hurriedly assumed a defensive pose—just in case the Amazon decided to “beat the shit in my asshole into shitty sprinkles”. I was well aware she had that habit! I was also careful to watch that she wouldn’t grab one of the small chairs because, in this case, I had to be ready to raise the small table in front of me as a shield.

Thank God, the sexy golfer didn’t do any of these things. Instead, I just saw a tiny spark looming for a moment deep into her eyes, connecting to a lost memory, after which she pursed her black lips so tightly that they almost turned white as she rumbled, “This flavor is out of stock now! What do you say about a cup of green lemonade?”

I sighed resignedly. She had obviously recognized me.

“And what do you say about it being terribly cold?” I asked rather recklessly.

“It’ll be as cold as the lonely death of a seal trapped in the ice outside Baffin Island!”

I literally shivered with cold and replied, “Okay!”

The waitress gave me a cool nod and turned around, showing me her splendid butt under the high-cut, see-through panties she wore beneath the dress. I screwed her ass into my mind and didn’t stop until it vanished in the room behind the counter. Then I heard some rattling coming out of there.

I looked around and sighed again, wondering what to do next. My main idea when I came here was to meet the bearded bum who was telling cock-and-bull stories, and I thought of asking the dark priestess about him, but now I wasn’t so sure she would be happy if I did so. I had just started to consider giving up my lemonade—I was actually sorry because I really wanted to see it coming on a silver tray between the bopping tits of the waitress—when the glass door behind my back suddenly opened. I cast a brief glance at it and saw a guy walking in.

He was a man who wore a long brown leather coat—dirty and punctured with holes that looked like bullet holes—but he wasn’t my old friend. This one had nothing on his head, and his face was shaven—here and there, at least. His hair was grayish and relatively clean—kind of combed too—and there was a sense of good reason in his gaze.

The dude entered the establishment and slowly walked to a table next to mine without looking at me. There he sat, silent, but I knew he was secretly watching me. He endured exactly twenty-two seconds before opening his mouth, and then he said threateningly, “Don’t you dare touch her!”

“Touch who?” I turned my head around to ask him, innocent as a newborn baby.

“You know exactly who I’m talking about!”

“No, I don’t! I really have no idea what you’re talking about!” I insisted.

“I noticed you were staring! You had sex with her in your mind!”

“And did you notice how she moaned with pleasure in her mind?” I kept provoking the guy because our little conversation seemed quite fun. Besides, I really hoped something would come out of this eventually, and if I were lucky, I would even find the bum I was looking for.

“I noticed!” my new friend replied, sulking. “I’ll deal with her later!”

When I heard him, I barely stopped myself from bursting into laughter. Knowing the Amazon’s combat skills with small chairs, I couldn’t see this grasshopper of a man surviving more than five seconds when she was in action. He didn’t seem capable enough to endure even a slap with a peacock feather, let alone her famous swing! He actually looked like a cheap toy whose parts were made hastily and glued together with plasticine. At first, I thought I should draw out my Colt and let the weapon take the guy down from the clouds, but then I decided not to bother my iron friend for nothing. Instead, I waited patiently until the jealous grump was done nagging me about my inexcusable behavior, and then I casually asked him, “What happened to your predecessor?”

The man didn’t get my point at all. He seemed pretty dumb, actually. He started telling me something about his father: the story of how he traveled across America in a coal train car; how he helped the CEO of General Motors change a flat tire on US 75 in Oklahoma, thus saving him from the tornado raging in the area; how the in next year, he decided to travel to Canada in the same train car, but he got stuck in the woods near Lake Huron; how, years later, his son—the guy I was talking to—followed in his father’s steps, hoping to save him; how he sneaked into a coal train; how he traveled north; how he got stuck in the woods near Lake Huron, and so on and so forth. Eventually, it all started looking like a soap opera to me, and I had to interrupt the nutcase and explain to him what my question was really about.

He immediately stopped the gibbering and stared at me, thinking. He actually strained his brain so much that a vein popped out in the middle of his forehead, but unfortunately, he remembered nothing. He said he was unaware of any ice cream pets Cleopatra might have had in the past and added that he didn’t like ice cream at all—he loved cakes.

As he said this, the woman we were talking about appeared on the horizon again. At first, she was just a dark mist behind the counter, then she transformed into a black cloud quickly approaching us, and finally, she turned into an angry hurricane hitting the shore. A minute later, when her tits cast an anchor just a few inches away from me and her tulle dress stopped waving around her, she assumed the shape of a woman again. I stared at her dreamily—pretty much like her new pet had warned me not to—and meanwhile, he kept puffing behind my back, unable to do anything about it.

The waitress took my lemonade mug from the tray and put it on the table before me without saying a word. I grabbed it and put the drink in my mouth, where my burning lips evaporated everything before I could even swallow. In the blink of an eye, the drink was gone, and now it all had to start over. Given the terrible mood of the lemonade fairy, though, I wasn’t quite sure it was such a good idea to order another mug. To spare myself further trouble, I decided to get straight to the point instead.

“Okay now, look! I’m a cop,” I started talking after clearing my throat to attract everybody’s attention in the hall. “I investigate a vicious drug case, which is hugely important on two continents. My work could save many lives, from Alaska down to Patagonia, and your ex-boyfriend—the one with the ice cream—is a critical witness. His testimony will decide whether humanity will overthrow the shackles of drug addiction once and for all or whether the lives of countless young people all over the globe will be ruined and they’ll be deprived of their future. I need you to help me find your ex-boyfriend!”

When I was done talking, I looked at her expectantly and smacked my lips to get rid of the sugary taste on them. I actually wanted to throw in a word or two about the Dalai Lama, World Peace, and the Illuminati, but I stopped myself at the last moment because I suspected I had already gotten too far anyway.

Quite naturally, Cleopatra wasn’t moved by my speech at all, and she didn’t bother to shed a single tear about the unfortunate young addicts around the globe. I wasn’t even sure she had listened to me while I made my plea on their behalf. She only opened her mouth to say nonchalantly, “If you see the damn fuck, tell him if he comes here, I’m gonna puncture a hole in his skull and screw the basin permanently to his stupid head!”

Then she suddenly turned around and walked away, bopping her beautiful ass up and down in a two-quarter time signature and leaving the fate of humanity in fate’s hands. The fellow behind my back—the cake lover—got sore about it right away.

“If she’s upset, you’ll totally get it!” He roared uncompromisingly, and then quickly ran after his naked queen to comfort her.

I sighed and looked around myself, confused. Suddenly, I was alone again, sitting in my small chair with my empty mug in front of me, and again, I had no idea what to do next. I guess I just had to leave. It wasn’t my day for telling stories, obviously, and even if it were, I clearly wasn’t good enough to make people believe them. Maybe the next time I meet the bum with the basin, I should ask him to teach me how to do it!

Still hugely disappointed, I got up, and for the second time in my life, I sneaked out of that milk bar without paying. Outside, on the street, a hundred and one red-hot steam hammers promptly banged on my head, trying to shape it into the form of an anvil on which to forge a crown for my stupidity. I literally found myself stepping right into hell. In fact, it was more than that! I felt I was deep into the dry mouth of a thirsty fox that had crept to the bottom of its stifling den under the hell. The asphalt beneath my feet was already bubbling like boiling soup, and the air wriggled agonizingly, asphyxiating from its own lack of oxygen.

Dizzy and staggering, I cautiously approached my car. The poor thing was so hot that the paint of the front hood had turned from red to purple. I sneaked inside and tried to start the engine, and it started, but I was afraid it would explode any minute now. Then I tried to drive.

At first, nothing happened. The Ford wouldn’t move at all because the tires had clearly melted and stuck to the asphalt. After a couple of seconds, though, the rubber probably stretched into threads because we slowly moved on with whatever was left of it on the wheel rims. At the same time, inside the car, the accelerator and the brake felt like marzipan bars under my feet, and I was pretty sure they were going to stick to the soles of my shoes very soon.

On top of that, it turned out I couldn’t hold the steering wheel with my bare hands because it burned painfully. Instead, I just let the car drive itself for most of the time, and I only interfered every now and then to guide us through the empty streets, navigating between abandoned ice cream carts and dried-up Coca-Cola fountain machines. Every hundred feet, a forgotten newspaper on the sidewalk would burst into flames of despair, and the valves of the fire hydrants would pop like firecrackers from the terrible heat.

About half an hour later, in such a hostile atmosphere, I finally got to my hotel.

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