When I stepped into Cacadulu, it was the late afternoon, or maybe even early evening, and I was on my last legs. I couldn’t even believe I was still breathing! My brutally abandoned and disappointed receptionist nymph was missing again, and I was glad she was because I was tired and sweaty like a dockworker who had just loaded the entire Titanic all by himself with fuel and provisions for its last journey. For the same reason, I headed for the elevator instead of taking the stairs.

I reached the door, pushed the button, and waited patiently for the bell to ring. Soon, the door opened, and I walked inside, but then I unexpectedly tripped over the bellhop, lying on the floor, doubled up. He looked really, really terrible, and he was shaking badly—obviously doped. When he saw me coming in, he bleated with a hollow voice, “Whusup, me’!” Then he took the trouble to raise his body a little—just enough to reach the line of buttons on the control panel and push an arbitrary one—after which he dropped back down and immediately sank into the sticky swamp of his catatonic stupor.

We rode the elevator like this: I stood up, and he lay curled at my feet all the way to the fourth floor. I stepped out there and took the stairs to the fifth because I didn’t want to disturb the guy with my insignificant earthly problems. After all, according to the Indians in the Amazon rainforest, he communicated with gods now.

Up in our room, Lara was just getting up from her heavy, twelve-hour-long hibernation. She looked like a grizzly bear prematurely pulled out of her winter sleep: her hair was ruffled as if she had suffered an electric shock; her eyes were swollen as if she had had a fight with Mohamed Ally; and her shirt was so twisted around her torso that the buttons were on her back, making it possible for her breasts to stay undercover for the first time since I met her.

“Where have you been all day?” She asked hoarsely, even before I stepped into the room.

I looked at her, puzzled. She had clearly woken up just five minutes ago, and I didn’t know how she knew I had been missing all day, but I didn’t bother to ask her.

“I went to the zoo to kill an hour or two because I couldn’t sleep.” I replied nonchalantly.

“Really?” She unexpectedly took an interest in my day. “Did you see something funny while you were there?”

“As a matter of fact, I did!” I decided to tease her a little. “There was an accident, and a kid got injured in the lion’s den.”

Lara looked at me, surprised.

“No shit!” She was even more interested now. “And what did the kid’s mother do?”

“The mother was actually chatting with the other moms at the playground, and she didn’t see a thing.”

“Wow! That’s rough! Mothers can be real motherfuckers sometimes, you know!” Immanuel Kant of Sheyenne presented me with her prairie philosophy, and then she added, “When I was at the zoo the last time, the only interesting thing I saw was ass-picking.”

“What do you mean by that?” I didn’t get her point. “You saw mothers picking at each other’s asses?”

She glared at me for a moment. “For fuck’s sake, what’s wrong with you and your shitty pervert mind? Of course, I didn’t see that! I’m talking about the monkeys!”

“I’m just asking,” I shrugged and stepped onto the balcony for a quick smoke. As I lit the cigarette, I looked at the street beneath my feet, and it seemed even more brutal now than in the morning when we checked in. It was literally clogged with garbage cans and other crap, as if we weren’t in America in the late twentieth century but in the poorest slum in Mumbai a hundred years ago.

Inside the room, Lara promptly used the short break from our weird conversation to grab the evidence of my early morning sexual disgrace and utilize a significant amount of its contents. The bottle of Johnnie Walker was still on the nightstand, but the white rose in it was now openly inebriated and red. The corner beneath the window turned out to be the detox ward where it was thrown to rethink its addiction, and the small paradise it was extracted from promptly became a playground for the invader. In fact, the flower had incredible luck that the invader didn’t think it was a suitable snack for a drink!

“Last night, I knocked myself out a bit. I think I’m gonna keep it cool tonight!” Miss Big Words started throwing promises in my face after quenching her thirst. After that, she patted her chest and belched, which was a really “reassuring” sign.

“You mean this morning you knocked yourself out big time,” I altered her phrase, stepping inside but leaving the door open. “Don’t worry! I’ve left no more hidden Johnnie Walker vases in the room to tempt you. This is the only one.”

The drunk just snorted and pounded down another gulp, after which the bottle in her hand withered, showing obvious signs of anemia. I stubbed my cigarette in the ashtray and took the clothes I had brought for her, throwing them on the bed. Then I put my gun in the nightstand drawer and headed to the bathroom to take another shower because I still felt dirty after my traumatizing experience in the car.

About twenty minutes later, when I came out, the pants and the shirt were still there, and Lara didn’t seem to have noticed them. I expected as much. Her inborn cowboy attitude stopped her from changing her clothes without a grave and pressing reason. After all, they were still good enough—only having a couple of insignificant stains of mayonnaise and ketchup and a few splotches of her puke. Other than that, they were just fine.

Since it was still indecently early for work and the weather wasn’t motivating for outdoor activities, I decided to take my time and poke my nose into Lara’s previous life. That is, if she had any life before she met me. Lately, I suspected that god had created her and sent her to me with the only mission in mind to punish me for the mistakes I had made in my life.

“So, is this how you usually tackle all your problems?” I asked her casually, trying to start a conversation about her alcohol-abusing habits. “With drinking bouts and blackouts?”

“What do you even mean?” Virgin Mary didn’t understand my question.

“Well, you haven’t been sober and alert for longer than a few hours during the past week, have you?”

“What is your point exactly?” She glanced at me, still surprised, as if it wasn’t obvious, even to a blind, deaf, and stone-dead mole in its hole a hundred miles underground, what my point was.

I chose to be highly graphic in my explanation because I wanted to be sure that at least some of its meaning would work its way into her blurry mind.

“My point is that ever since we met, you’ve consumed as much alcohol as a small brewery would produce to satisfy the demand in a small prairie town,” I elaborated.

“And why does it have to be a prairie town?” Lara grunted, keeping our little chat ever more weird and absurd.

I looked at her, stupefied and unable to answer. Well, why indeed? Holly smoke; I hadn’t even thought about it. I didn’t know it was that important!

“You know what? I think you’re no better than me, actually.” The bibber went on, suddenly retaliating to my attack. “Let me ask you something! How much do you think the brewery would need to produce if you lived in that same town?”

“It’s natural for a man in my line of work to let off steam sometimes!” I tried to defend my reasonable habit of having a few drinks during the day.

“Well, it’s only natural for your clients to take the edge off, while waiting for you to let off steam!” She dodged it surprisingly skillfully. “It would have been nice if you at least did your fucking job between your drinking sessions!”

I frowned, offended. Nevertheless, I didn’t want to initiate a fight over something as subjective as my daily routine, so I promised myself I wouldn’t fall not to fall for it.

“It’s very stressful working with you,” I explained calmly. “And just so you know, I do work between and during my sessions. The problem is that most of the time, you’re too wasted to notice it because, unlike me, you can’t hold your liquor. And then, after you come to your senses and your next terrible hangover hits you, you’re stressing me out and won’t let me do my job. That’s the actual reason for our slow progress!”

“Phew!” My opponent totally refused to see my point, which I expected. “You urban pussies don’t even know the first thing about working in a stressful environment! If you slaved twelve hours a day on an oil drilling rig outside Evanston, you’d know what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, come on!” I didn’t bite. “Don’t tell me you’ve worked on an oil rig because I’ll just laugh in your face!”

“I didn’t, but I know what it’s like!” Sheyenne’s slave dog didn’t give up her attempts to make me feel bad. “My father worked there long enough, taking me with him sometimes, so I surely know the routine.”

“Your father was an oil worker?” I was sincerely surprised because I would probably have gone for a cowboy or a farmer if I had to guess.

“He was a derrickman,” Lara readily explained. There isn’t much to do in Sheyenne outside of the oil industry, you know. Almost the entire state belongs to Amoco.”

“I didn’t know that. What about your mother? Did she work on an oil rig, too?”

“No, my mother was a nurse. She died upon my sister’s delivery when I was two and a half years old. I barely remember her.”

Probably, at this moment, it would have been appropriate for me to say I was sorry—or at least to shut my mouth about it—but I just mumbled instead, “So you were two sisters and your father, living in a little house on the prairie like in the TV show. Were there any evil Indians around to make your life more exciting?”

My assistant gave me a weird look.

“No,” she answered curtly. “My father was good enough in this role!”

And as she said that, she sharply turned around to grab the whiskey bottle again. She was obviously quickly losing interest in the conversation without a swig every now and then. I didn’t say anything about it, but I definitely didn’t like it.

“Actually, he wasn’t around most of the time,” Lara continued after the short booze break. “It’s about six hundred miles between Evanston and Sheyenne, so he couldn’t come every night, but when he did—usually stewed to the gills—he’d jump into the role of being a parent, which he wasn’t. One night, he surprisingly popped in at ten when we weren’t expecting him and put on a hell of a show. At the time, an old and almost deaf aunt of ours kept an eye on us, but she stayed downstairs in her room as usual, watching soap operas with the TV volume so loud that it thundered all the way to the Rocky Mountains and back. Sonya and I were upstairs, having fun with two of our neighbors when our dad rushed into the living room downstairs like a hurricane and started shouting and breaking things. The poor boys literally peed their pants! They were so scared that they jumped out of the window on the second floor, and when our father saw them in the yard, he started shooting at them with his rifle. Luckily, he was too drunk to hit an elephant from ten yards away, so nobody got hurt eventually.”

“And what happened next?” I asked her when she paused again to take another gulp. “Did he come upstairs to kick your slutty asses?”

“No, but he ripped our aunt’s ass apart for ‘letting underage fuckers into the fucking house,’ she finger-quoted the last words. “The poor woman barely survived it. The next morning, two of our uncles came around with shotguns and bats, and they beat the crap out of the old bastard, so everything was settled in the end. This is how you resolve problems in Wyoming, you know. Nobody bothers to call the police!”

When she stopped talking, I looked at her, very intrigued. It explained many things about her personality and actions, and I thought I should cut her some slack after all. With relatives like hers, it was only normal to behave like that.

“Ultimately, the outcome of the entire fuss was that we raised ourselves alone from that moment on,” Lara finished her little story with the next gulp. “All of our relatives gave up on us, and nobody wanted to come to our house anymore. I think it was one of the reasons for my sister’s decision not to return home. It’s tough to live in a place where everybody hates you for what your father did!”

I didn’t reply but reached out to pull the bottle out of her hand because she was already pissing me off with her constant swigging. The evening hadn’t even kicked off officially yet, and she was already drunk! Lara didn’t react to my invasion and let it go.

“After all, it seems you’ve had pretty sweet teenage years,” I concluded after securing the booze in my hands. “Most kids would only dream of escaping parental control for a few nights over their childhood.”

“It’s true,” Lara agreed, and she licked her lower lip thirstily. “The asshole totally got it, and when Sonya turned sixteen, we kicked him out of the house for good. I guess he still lives in a caravan near the rig, but I don’t think he works there anymore. No one would let an alcoholic operate drilling machines, you know.”

I nodded to indicate that I knew and screwed the cap back on the bottle. The poor bastard had really met his match with his wild daughters. That’s how it usually goes in life, though. People never think about Newton’s third law when raising their kids. They miss to realize their bullshit will provoke a reaction that will come back to them hard when they are old.

At this point, I was pretty much tired of Lara’s bullshit and didn’t want to hear anymore. My curiosity about her life was utterly exhausted, and I wanted to call it a day. Besides, I really hoped I could give it another try with Sandra because I felt terrible about the mistake I had made earlier this morning. Unfortunately, my assistant didn’t think so. During the next hour, having gained momentum in storytelling, she enlightened me with more of her “career” as a growing-up Sheyenne beauty. She visualized for me—quite graphically—how she helped Sonya get rid of her virginity, giggling the entire time while explaining it to me. It turned out she had used a banana to deflower her little sister because the matter had been delicate, and the tool had to be soft and delicate, too, as she put it. Unfortunately, the improvised dildo broke inside the patient’s vagina, so the “doctor” had to scoop it out with a teaspoon eventually. By the way, telling me about it didn’t make her uncomfortable at all. She also shared with me other embarrassing things of this sort, but after hearing about the deflowering, I simply stopped listening.

As she talked, Lara never actually stopped looking fixedly at my hands. It was clear that when I took the bottle from her a while ago, she thought I was going to have a sip and pass it back, and now she wondered why it was taking me so long to do it. To end the confusion, I just turned around and threw the bottle out the window so she understood the whiskey was gone for good. After a few seconds, we heard the noise of broken glass and someone shouting angrily down the street, but since I’ve never been into poking my nose into other people’s lives and since the situation didn’t seem serious, I just ignored it. Anyway, it worked. Lara looked at me, puzzled at first, but without seeing her pacifier in my hands, she totally lost interest in talking.

She stayed in bed a bit longer but soon got bored and got up. She staggered heavily while doing so. I looked at her, frustrated, and thought that maybe my preventive maneuver with the bottle had come too late after all. She didn’t seem capable of getting her stupid ass even to the bathroom, and that was probably why she didn’t try. Instead, she turned around and walked out onto the balcony, starting to climb down the fire escape. I jumped up, horrified, when I saw where she was trying to put her left foot—she thought the downspout was the way to go!

I promptly threw myself toward her and pulled her back at the last possible moment before she fell. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? Are you trying to meet your dead mother?” I shouted at her.

“I’m gonna check on the scumbags in that shack in the harbor,” she replied, unconcerned. “That’s what the entire whore-interrogating thing was all about, right?”

And without further explanation, she turned again—this time in the right direction—and decisively grabbed the fire escape railing. Quite naturally, she refused to give it up when I tried to talk her out of it, and she also refused to postpone it until we had thought everything through. She wouldn’t hear about other, more conventional methods like taking the hotel’s staircase or riding the elevator because it had to be incognito, she insisted. “We needed an alibi in case something goes wrong!”

To be honest, she had a good point here, but that didn’t make me feel better about her intentions. Maybe the alcohol hadn’t affected her mind as badly as it looked after all, but it had undoubtedly impaired her movements, and I momentarily realized I had to be with her. Right after taking this decision, I was overwhelmed by the vast list of things that could go wrong and mess with Lara’s awful plan while executing it. For example, we didn’t know whether we would be able to approach the place unnoticed; whether the Butterfly had warned her pimps about our little interrogation; what terrible surprise might be waiting for us in the shack; and how we were supposed to leave the place if the “terrible surprise” decided to chase after us. Unfortunately, none of these highly unpleasant variables helped me persuade my partner that her idea was bullshit.

Eventually, I managed to change only one thing before we set the entire operation in motion: I should be the first to climb down the fire escape. I actually didn’t like the possibility that my partner might collapse upon me, but I had no choice because watching her from above as she collapsed alone scared me even more. Of course, the second option would have spared me a lot of trouble concerning my health and nerves, but since I had always been known as incredibly foolish, I completely missed my point here.

Thank god, none of us was destined to die that evening, and after ten very stressful minutes, we safely reached the ground. Or at least I reached it. Lara just stopped about six feet before the end of the stairs and shouted, “Catch me!” Then she jumped. The only problem was that when she did it, she had already been flying down for a few seconds, zipping past me and crashing into the nearby garbage can. She didn’t even give me the slightest chance to react—not that I would have taken it because the entire thing was actually very stupid—but anyway!

“God damn you, you hopeless prick! Haven’t you played basketball in school?” I heard her swearing somewhere in the trash right after she landed there. Thankfully, it was already too dark, so I didn’t get to see her expression.

“No, I played chess at school,” I replied curtly. “We don’t usually throw figures at each other in this game!”

Grunting, she got up, patting her clothes to remove the garbage. It was surprising because she didn’t seem like the sort of person who would care about it, but she did it anyway. One thing I definitely had to give her, though. She had a strong skull; her father would have been proud of her if he had been around.

After we were both on our feet and ready to go, we quickly discussed our options and agreed to leave the Ford in the parking lot and take a cab because it would be good for our alibi, too. It was actually a wise decision, provided we knew exactly where we were going. And we didn’t! During the entire time in the car, we kept arguing about it, and when we eventually arrived at the harbor, the cab driver was so pissed off that he literally kicked us out, charging us the equivalent of the Cayman Islands gross domestic product. Lara paid the bill without batting an eyelid, and as I watched the ease with which she kept taking money out of her pockets, I started thinking she was a magician. Maybe she just put pieces of paper in one of them, and they turned into dollars when she pulled them out of the other. There was simply no other explanation!

We quickly got out of the car, and for almost half an hour, we walked around the neighborhood, looking for the exact place. Unfortunately, all the intersections in the area were so alike, and the buildings were so old and wasted that we couldn’t tell them apart. At some point, I stopped by a small pier just outside the seaport fence and took the crumpled picture of Sonya and her friends out of my shirt pocket. Then I stepped on the platform and turned around, raising it in front of my eyes. Despite the darkness and ketchup marks on the photo, the places obviously matched.

I looked at Lara. She looked at me, too, and I silently nodded toward a rickety shack beside an abandoned three-story building that threatened to collapse over it any minute. They were both behind her back. About fifty yards to the left, I saw an open space covered in asphalt, probably an untended parking lot, now crammed with scrap metal and other trash.

I involuntarily shuddered. The place looked ominous, and it was dark as hell. I saw Lara hesitantly scratching her head, and then she whispered that we had to be very careful. I was actually surprised to hear her say it because it wasn’t her style, and I presumed she was scared, too. She suggested that only one of us go in so the other might call for help if anything got wrong. At first, I frivolously approved her idea before realizing that “one of us” would be me. At the next moment, I felt ruthlessly deceived, but it was too late; I had already agreed to her plan.

With a sinking heart, I stepped off the pier and sneaked to the shack, moving to the front to scout a bit. I eavesdropped there for a minute or two with my ear pressed against the wall, but it was quiet on the other side. Then, I cautiously looked through the window. It was dark, and I couldn’t see anything inside, which made me shudder again. It was spookier than an Egyptian tomb, and I couldn’t imagine any normal person living there. Tutankhamun would have surely picked the place for his eternal home had he known that Carter would desecrate the original one at the beginning of the century!

In the next second, as if to confirm my fears, a cat nervously shrieked somewhere in the darkness and literally put me on my toes. Horrified, I thought it must be a black cat living its ninth life because I doubted an ordinary one would dare stay in a scary place like this. I actually wanted to scream, too, and run somewhere safe—preferably in a place with lots of sandy beaches—but I had to show Lara what a tough and fearless bastard I was, so I gathered myself together and pretended I was calm.

Since nothing extraordinary happened in the following two minutes—no one cared to come out and see what I was doing here—and since I started losing control of my nerves again, I turned around and cautiously moved to the door to end this torture as soon as possible. It didn’t surprise me at all that the door was unlocked, and after listening tensely for another two minutes, I quietly pushed it open. More silence and more darkness met me inside, and while hoping the scumbags hadn’t gone to bed too early, I stepped into their place, leaving Lara outside to make stupid gestures to me.

It all changed right after I sank into the shack, though. Things immediately turned one hundred and eighty degrees, and I momentarily realized the sheer recklessness of my ill-judged break-in. It was actually my assistant who was to blame for the latter. When I was around her, I was not only Murphy the Great but also Murphy fucking Bond, who would embark on reckless, suicidal missions totally unprepared and without thinking at all. Like the current situation here: I had no flashlight, no gun, no nothing! I had left my Colt in the hotel because I hadn’t planned on doing this tonight, and now that I had left Lara behind and her poisonous influence loosened its grip on me, I suddenly realized what I was really doing.

Despite everything, I kept pushing forward blindly because I just couldn’t turn back with my pants soiled and admit that I was scared to the very core of my gentle soul. And even though the place looked deserted, it didn’t stop my knees from wobbling and my legs shaking so severely that my pants literally whipped like the sails of a brigantine, being chased by the wind around Cape Horn. Every time I tripped over something, and it rattled with a nerve-wracking noise in the darkness, I jumped up terrified, expecting to meet my death. The door behind my back was still open, but outside on the street, it was almost as dark as inside, so it was no help.

Eventually, I reached a wall and stopped. When I touched it, it felt weirdly wet and kind of greasy, and since I couldn’t think of a single reason why that would be, my treacherous imagination unleashed itself, driving me to the horrible conclusion that someone’s brain and blood were smeared on the wall. Shaking uncontrollably, I started grouping in the darkness to gather more information about the trap I had voluntarily put myself in, but I was doing it somewhat mechanically. In my mind, I was actually trying to teleport myself to the Lesser Antilles five hundred years before white people came to the islands and turned them into drug stops between the Americas. And to make things even worse, soon, my hands grasped something hanging from the ceiling, which felt like a metal chain. My imagination whirled again and hurled me into the scene from MacLean’s “Puppet on a Chain,” making me see myself hanging on that thing.

And that was actually the end of my heroic journey! Suddenly, I couldn’t bear it any longer, and the last bits of dignity in my head disappeared instantly. I sharply plunged for the door, crying desperately in my mind, but surprisingly, I hit another wall after taking just two steps back. I banged my nose into something, and the blow was so severe that thousands of sparks danced around me, making the entire place burst into bright light as if a nuclear bomb had exploded in a tiny matchbox.

I looked around myself, dazed. It turned out that, in my panic, I had accidentally turned on the lights. Before that, I had obviously walked through the entire shack without realizing what I was doing, and I had crammed myself into the tiny bathroom. Now, after bouncing back from the wall, I was sitting on the toilet bowl with the toilet tank chain rattling anxiously near my left ear. At the same time, I was trying to stop my cowardly heart from coming out of my mouth and saving itself alone.

After taking a minute to calm myself a bit, I nervously stood up and turned around to take a piss. After all these wild emotions and stressful moments, I needed it anyway, and besides, I was in the right place. Then I zipped my fly back up, patted myself clean, straightened out my clothes, and returned to the living room to switch on the lights there, too.

Lara was already sticking her head through the door, looking curiously inside, her eyes full of awe. She was obviously amazed by the supernatural bravery I had just demonstrated, but she was still too overwhelmed to say anything about it. I didn’t comment on my heroism either.

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