When I woke up the following morning with my face and eyes swollen from too much sleep, thank god the sun hadn’t burned the earth yet. From the open window, I could feel relatively cool air coming in, which was a pleasant change. To my surprise, Lara was missing from the room again. The fact disturbed me quite a lot this time because I was starting to think she was conducting her own investigation, which was different from mine. This couldn’t lead to anything good, for sure.

I thought about the situation. My discussion with her about changing base camps was obviously on hold now, and the delay posed a significant threat to our investigation and even our lives. We had no reasonable chance to find information about her sister while staying in this miserable hotel, and besides, we only blew tons of money here instead of paying my rent with it. Switching it to my place was a good idea indeed, but I knew bringing my assistant on board wouldn’t be easy. She would probably resist by all means possible.

Since it was still too early to go out, I spent the morning taking a shower, shaving, watching TV, smoking a pack of cigarettes, and doing a medium-level crossword puzzle in a couple of months old newspaper, which I found ditched behind one of the nightstands. Somewhere around noon, when the weather became “pleasant” and “stimulating” for work, I sneaked out to tackle another urgent problem of mine—Sandra. I had no intention of showing good manners anymore when communicating with her. With my latest findings about her business, we no longer had to play hide-and-seek.

When I walked to the lobby, however, I found the reception desk empty. I peeked into the bar, too, but she wasn’t there either. My next try was in the parking lot outside, where I noticed her red Porsche as usual, but now, another eye-catching monster was parked next to it. It was a bright red Ferrari Testarossa, which I had never seen before. My intuition immediately suggested something strange was going on.

I nervously looked up and down the street, and since I couldn’t see anything suspicious, I walked back to the lobby. I moved behind the reception desk to try the door behind it, where I had noticed Sandra sneaking in a couple of times. Then I cautiously opened it.

A long, narrow corridor stretched before my eyes, which didn’t surprise me. I have been on a roll with such places lately, and they usually brought me nothing but trouble. I was happy that this one, at least, wasn’t decorated with pictures of celebrities and wasn’t red, which I had started to accept as an invariable characteristic of corridors in general. Instead, it looked ordinary and dark—clearly part of the hotel’s office area.

Since no immediate danger presented itself in the following minute and I didn’t know what else to do, I decided to follow the established routine in such cases and sneak recklessly inside in search of god knows what. If Lara were here with me, that would have happened anyway, so there was no point in changing anything.

A small awning window on the dead-end wall ahead of me was the only light source, and there were two lines of doors evenly distributed along both sides of the corridor. I tried the first one to my left, but it was locked. The one to the right of me gave in, and when I opened it, it revealed a laundry room full of all sorts of bed linen, robes, tablecloths, towels, and housekeeping uniforms. Weirdly enough, there was also something very bright and flashy among them, which I couldn’t identify at first, but then I realized it was a red latex sado-maso outfit.

I looked at it, quite surprised. It was so weird! I couldn’t even start to imagine why someone would send such a thing for laundering, so I stepped into the room to examine it. When I did it, it all became even weirder. I noticed a leather whip nearby, which was obviously part of the same set, and I used it to check out the SM suit without touching the latter. There was nothing special about it, actually, and I glanced up at the laundry chute opening, puzzled. Someone had probably dropped the thing here by mistake or just gotten rid of it after a wild night of role-playing. Maybe it was a hotel guest. As I watched it, I pictured myself for a moment wearing it but soon decided I looked really awful in it and quickly took it off before the laundry lady came around and caught me in the middle of my virtual try-on session. Then I hurriedly stepped outside, ashamed.

I quietly shut the door behind my back and resumed my search behind the second door to my right. Quite in the order of things for a place next to the laundry room, it turned out to be a drying room. In contrast to the mess I found back there, everything here was hung on hangers and racks or neatly folded and placed on shelves along the walls. I looked around for a minute or two, but nothing caught my eye, so eventually, I sneaked back outside.

My inspection continued with the second door to my left, which was locked again. After trying it, I stopped in the middle of the corridor and asked myself what the hell I was doing here. My search seemed utterly pointless. What did I even expect to find in a hotel except for dirty laundry and stuff of this sort? After all, the place was supposed to serve guests, not act as a drug hub or something! Despite this, I continued my raid and approached the third door to my left without further speculating whether I should do this. I grabbed the lock, expecting to storm into some supply room now or even the kitchen itself, when my hand froze in the middle of my gesture. I could hear faint whispering on the other side.

I nervously glanced up the corridor and listened carefully to the people talking. A man and a woman seemed to be discussing something, but they were obviously deep in the room or deliberately kept their voices low because I couldn’t recognize a word. Highly intrigued, I embraced the door, pressing my ear against its surface in a desperate attempt to catch something that made sense. After a few seconds, my heart started beating wildly because one of the voices sounded familiar to me. It was Sandra’s!

“Don’t worry, I’ll get the sluts!” she said quietly.

“When?” the man asked worriedly.

“Soon enough. The first chance I get.”

“I’m gonna ride them well!” the guy continued.

“What the hell are you talking about? Why would you do that?” The hotel owner scolded him. “I’ll personally sperm every single one of them and flush their lashes down the toilet.”

I drew my head back, seriously surprised and wondering what was happening. Something was terribly wrong with this conversation! I eavesdropped again, and in my attempt to hear better, I literally scratched on the wood with my nails like a puppy dog who wanted to get in. If I kept doing this, the guys inside would surely suspect something and come check out what was happening. Given my pose, if they really did that, I would immediately roll inside the room and thud on the floor like a sack of potatoes, with no excuse for hanging outside.

“There’s another problem, though. This dirty mop, Mellrow, keeps smoking around!” Soon, I heard Sandra talking again, and when she mentioned my name, I felt an unpleasant chill crawling up my spine. I had no idea she considered me a dirty mop, and I definitely didn’t know she was so pissed off by my smoking!

“Don’t worry,” the man in the room tried to soothe her frustration. “I can arrange for someone to taste his dick.”

“No. It would be better if I gave Tanaka a hint. He’d take care of it!”

After hearing all this, I felt terribly anxious and stirred uneasily behind the door. Probably I had to be flattered that people thought so highly of me that they wanted to send someone to suck my dick, but strangely enough, I wasn’t. My entire eavesdropping outside in the corridor continued until the moment when my mind finally overcame the initial shock, and as it shook off the sexual context of the conversation, it suddenly grasped the true meaning of the words. After that, the puzzle pieces twirled frenziedly in my head, and they all took their proper places.

So the overall meaning came out like this: the guys inside had laid their hands on a bunch of sluts, and instead of riding them, the man actually wanted to hide them, but Sandra disagreed. She insisted on committing the horrible act of burning them—not sperming—and getting rid of their ashes—not lashes—in the toilet. She probably wanted to do that because I was a dirty cop, and I poked around, and she was sure I wouldn’t stop unless she sent someone to give me some kind of oral pleasure. I didn’t really understand why “tasting my dick” had to be a bad thing, but from the context of her words, I could definitely draw the conclusion it wasn’t good either. The entire thing with the sluts and their burning also didn’t fit very well, but the problem was solved pretty soon when the man’s muffled voice exclaimed, “I really hope Tanaka hasn’t made copies yet!”

“I doubt it,” Sandra firmly rejected the idea. “He doesn’t have a reason to suspect anything.”

Then, I suddenly got it all figured out. The baggie that changed owners a couple of times—first Larry and Bob, then Tanaka, then Sandra—contained a bunch of pictures, or most probably their photo negatives. The sluts, that is to say, the shots, were clearly of importance to all these guys because otherwise, Tanaka wouldn’t have killed Larry and Bob in the yard, and Sandra wouldn’t have taken the risk to sneak inside Eternity and steal them just an hour later. The only thing I still didn’t understand was why she had to lie to the guy inside this room about not having the shots. Was it possible she wanted to play Tanaka and him against each other?

Right after realizing what I had just heard, something else—even more terrible—occurred to me, and it literally made my hair stand on end and rustle restlessly at the door like the leaves of an old poplar tree. Tanaka actually knew nothing about Sandra’s betrayal. On the other hand, he knew perfectly well that Lara and I had been in his club that night, and now my cute little arachnid suddenly wanted to give the guy a hint to “taste my dick” or maybe rather to “waste the dick”! Whichever it was going to be, it would be the fucking end of my stupid life, and my only hope was that Tanaka didn’t yet know precisely where he was supposed to come for his sensual love session. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much of a hope, though!

Shuddering nervously, I quietly removed myself from the door, with horror butterflies flitting agitated in my stomach. I actually did it right at the moment when I heard a surprising noise down the corridor, which made all my fears about receiving unwanted blowjobs unpleasantly real. Then, when I looked toward the threat, I froze, unable to move or think because I saw a wonder I had never seen before. A giant ghost of bed sheets was swiftly approaching me with the explicit intention of running over me as if I were just an annoying pair of dirty underwear standing in its way.

Completely immobilized like a dormouse that sensed a snake at the entrance of its hole, I giddily realized something wasn’t right with this strange vision. My confusion continued until I slowly started understanding—surprised and enlightened at the same time—that behind the ball of bed sheets wasn’t hiding some horrible mythical monster but the hotel laundress, who was obviously coming to her “office.”

While panicking, I looked back at the window at the far end of the corridor, but it was too late to get there, and besides, it was just impossible to squeeze myself through such a small opening. At the same time, I couldn’t risk the boss of hygiene seeing me here because I would land myself in a very unpleasant situation. Fortunately, the laundry lady didn’t notice me, and with her head still buried in the pile of sheets, she stopped at the door to the laundry room and started pushing bed linen into it like an old stoker shoving coal into his hot furnace.

I promptly grabbed the opportunity to sneak out of the trap unnoticed, but just as I tried to pass behind the woman’s massive buttocks, she unexpectedly bent over and nearly spread my body all over the wall behind my back like peanut butter on a slice of bread. It was really a close shave! After escaping such a ridiculous death, I quickly ran outside, shaking, and continued snooping from a much safer position—the front seat of my old and tired, but also devoted and fateful Ford Galaxy.

I didn’t have to wait too long inside the car. I nervously tapped my fingers on the steering wheel for ten minutes—give or take—when a fancy-looking guy walked out of the hotel and headed to the parking lot. He was more than six feet tall with proportional features, a cleanly shaven face, and short brown hair. He wore sunglasses, and I couldn’t see his eyes, but he clearly didn’t belong in this neighborhood. His luxury gray suit was enough proof of that because it was probably worth the average monthly rent of a small office in this area. The guy briskly opened the Ferrari door and sat in the front seat, then started the engine and wildly zipped away.

I worriedly looked at my Ford and pursed my lips, embarrassed of what I was going to ask. The poor thing already knew what it would be, and she didn’t object, but obviously, I was very close to getting her all fed up with my insane car chases already. And she had every right to be mad at me! These were not brief trips to the nearby supermarket, and I was sure she cursed the day she left the factory and all the factory workers who never prepared her for the true life waiting for her outside.

Despite everything, my beauty gave her best to live up to my expectations, and although it wasn’t an easy task, and she had great trouble keeping up, we made it after all. We were helped by two factors: firstly, the guy in the Ferrari wasn’t a good driver, and secondly, at some point, I started realizing I knew the route very well. I had simply been in this area not so long ago, and when I remembered when and why, I promptly stomped my left foot on the brake, after which—to be on the safe side because Lara wasn’t here to help me—I stepped on my left foot with the right one.

I did all this just in time. Not more than a few seconds later, I zipped like a ballistic missile past the familiar road sign that read Villa Nueva and abruptly stopped only a few inches from the fence of the place itself. The vehicle snorted in the dust with two wheels in the gutter while Sandra’s rich boyfriend dashed through the gate, which opened only a second before he crashed into it. Five more seconds and the gate made a quiet “huum” and closed—long before the stupid idea of following the guy inside had occurred to me.

I nervously looked around and started the engine to move the car to my spot in this peculiar parking lot—the low-growing willow tree. Interestingly enough, even without Lara’s help, I almost managed to bend the bumper again. However, this time, it was the rear one. As it seemed, I had persistently missed my driving lessons in seventy-six—particularly those that were supposed to teach me reverse parking.

However, when I glanced in the rearview mirror to see what had happened, I realized it wasn’t my fault. Or, at least, it was, but not only my fault. I noticed my usual spot here was already taken, and I even saw the guy who had taken it. He was a paparazzo, standing by the open door of his own clunker and documenting with his camera my desperate attempt to get my Ford to crawl over his car. When he registered my intention to come out and ask him what he was doing here, he tried to hide the device behind his back, looking confused.

I angrily backed the vehicle a few feet, pulled the emergency brake, opened the door, stepped out, pulled my sleeves up, and prepared to fight for my rights. After all, the spot was mine—I found it first!

“What do you want?” The man raised his voice when he realized I wasn’t joking. He obviously thought I was a bodyguard for the big shot who owned Villa Nueva, and since his mistake suited me fine, I diligently took on my new role.

“I wanna break your stupid head!” I roared threateningly and approached him. “What are you hiding behind your back?”

“I’m warning you!” the paparazzo warned me. “I have a black belt in karate!”

“I’m warning you too!” I warned him back. “I have a bad temper early in the afternoon!”

Then I took another step toward him and angrily reached my hand behind him.

The bastard quickly stepped back and suddenly turned around, delivering such an unexpected Ushiro Mawashi-geri in my face that he sent me right on the trunk of my Ford—almost unconscious. It was literally a near-death experience. All the significant events in my life flashed before my eyes, but disappointingly enough, they seemed trivial, if not dull and boring. After that, I slowly sank into a soft milky-white mist, and a naked lady in a transparent white gown tenderly stroked my head, telling me that my time hadn’t yet come. Afterward, the fog dissipated, and the paparazzo appeared again. He was biting his upper lip not far from me, nervously waiting for my reaction.

I slowly rose to my elbows and slid my butt off the trunk. To test the operability of my jaw, I grabbed it in my hand, and it cracked, agitated, promising me it would never be the same again. Meanwhile, one of my eyes had learned to imitate an LED equalizer as it seemed, and it was improvising on a tune while my other eye watched it, utterly surprised.

I stretched a little and looked at the jerk, wondering whether to turn to my Colt for advice. Eventually, I rejected the idea because we were too close to the mansion. My iron friend was indeed a good adviser but bad-tempered and quite noisy in situations like this.

The black belt owner was still looking at me with curiosity.

“I warned you!” He suddenly opened his mouth again.

“Yes, you did that!” I confirmed.

“Besides, you’re not a bodyguard!” He stripped me of my brand new role unceremoniously.

He didn’t actually need to do that. I had already given up on it anyway. I had to do this for the sake of my well-digested supper when I was older and the steadiness of the world before my eyes. Nevertheless, for the sake of my maltreated and humiliated jaw, I decided to pick on him a bit more.

“You sure about that?” I asked condescendingly. “What else could I be if not a bodyguard, and why would I be here?”

“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure you’re not!”

“And how do you know? You have a crystal ball?”

“No. I’ve just never seen you hereabouts.”

“What’s that even supposed to mean?” I was surprised. “Do you sleep in a fucking tree house or what?”

“I actually sleep in my car.”

“Really? Well, you have a pretty big mouth for a man who sleeps in his car! You realize how pathetic it is?”

“And how is that connected?” The guy couldn’t see my point, which was no surprise because I couldn’t see it either. I just wanted to humiliate him.

“Okay, if you really sleep here, then you should know what’s happening in the big house over there. Tell me!” I decided to change my tactics, although I didn’t believe he would tell me anything. “You must know your neighbors, right?”

“Many things are happening. But that’s none of your business!”

“Oh, boy! You’re such an idiot, aren’t you? Don’t you see I’m a colleague?”

“Bullshit! You’re no colleague of mine!” Sherlock promptly stripped me of my next lame attempt to disguise myself as someone I wasn’t.

“Why am I hanging around here then?” I tried to mess with his head again.

“How the fuck would I know?”

“I’m a scribbler!”

“No, you’re not!”

“I am!”

“You are not!”

“What do you think I am if I’m not?”

He looked at me closely from head to toe and the other way around.

“I think you’re a gumshoe!” he suddenly announced with quite a disturbing certainty in his voice.

I looked at him, flabbergasted. What a fucking bastard he turned out to be! I really had to consider erasing the words “private” and “eye,” which I clearly had tattooed in bold letters on my forehead. Because of them, I haven’t been able to get reliable information from anyone lately. Despite that, I kept playing dumb and didn’t give up.

“Oh, you think you’re so smart, do you?” I said, annoyed. “Your problem is that you’re actually naïve . For one thing, you’re right, though; I’m not your colleague. FYI, I’m a funeral agent.”

The moron looked at me, mildly intrigued, and examined me again. Judging from the expression on his face, I clearly had the appearance of a funeral agent—at least to a point—because this time, he didn’t object to my new role.

“And what’s your business here?” he wanted to know after the pause. “Has someone died?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I think you might soon!”

“Ha!” He ridiculed me. “You’ll have to wait for that!”

“I will wait. I have plenty of time,” I sneered. “I have a client over there, in the house, who is on her way, so I might stay around a bit longer until you join her. She’s a cute little brunette with green eyes and a hell of a rack. Have you seen her?”

Generally, I was just shooting blindly in the dark without a distinctive idea of what I was trying to achieve, but surprisingly, I hit the bull’s eye in this situation.

“What do you know about the girls kept inside the house?” The guy suddenly narrowed his eyes, asking me in a serious tone.

Feeling hopeful now, I promptly put on a mysterious look and tried to devise something ambiguous enough to give me room for maneuvering. It was a hard thing to do without sufficient information, though.

“Why do you think I’d spill?” I laughed at him after I came up with nothing in the end. “You’d be better off staying here and watching the windows for a naked boob flashing behind the curtains. It’d be the world for a paparazzo like you!”

“I’m not a fucking paparazzo.” My karate friend snapped at me, offended. “I investigate what’s happening behind the boobs. I’m a serious journalist, so if you respect that, you’ll tell me what you know!”

I swallowed nervously. I desperately wanted to throw him a bone because the bastard clearly had things to share with me, but the problem was I had only a vague idea of what was happening behind the naked boobs. In fact, up until this moment, I wasn’t even sure if there were any boobs in there!

“Okay, but you spill first.” Eventually, I shrugged and opted for the childish trick kids love so much. I simply couldn’t think of anything more mature than that.

To my great disappointment, the smartass chose exactly the same approach. At some point, he even started to accept that I might really be his colleague.

“You really think I’m that stupid?” He laughed at me spitefully after reviewing my idea for a while and rejecting it. “Maybe I should write a material for you so you don’t wear out your typewriter’s keys?”

“I already told you I’m not a colleague, you silly fuck! I was just kidding at first. Boy, you’re really dumb!”

He kept looking at me suspiciously without saying anything.

“I’m a private eye; your very first assumption was right!” I went on, wondering how to win him over to my side. “And also, I don’t investigate stupid sex scandals, but drugs.”

The paparazzo eyed me up for a third time, and now he obviously decided I was telling the truth about myself at last.

“So you think Kurvallo has been using?” He asked me, still not entirely sure about my insinuation.

I puffed wearily.

“I don’t know. Probably, but that’s not the point. What’s so difficult for you to understand here? The point is that he is in the big game! You get it? He’s in the business of drugs and doesn’t care about dumbasses who lurk in the bushes around his house, hoping to snap some pictures.”

He suddenly looked at me sourly.

“Yeah, I think you’re definitely a PI or a cop. You’re too big of an asshole,” he announced in a second. “But you’re also naïve if you think the DEA’s chief would risk selling drugs at his parties. It’s the other way around; everybody who comes to his parties is already loaded with it!”

I spread my arms in the air, desperate. The guy could make me cry; he was a complete failure as a journalist! Nevertheless, I considered it unnecessary to open his eyes to the truth. One positive thing came out of our stupid little fight, though, and it was that, at least, I knew now whom I was dealing with. The boss of the Drug Enforcement Administration wasn’t some small fry, and his involvement totally changed Sandra’s role in this entire shit.

“Well, I spilled alright,” I tried to urge the moron to give me something in return after we watched each other for almost twenty seconds without anyone saying anything. “Now it’s your turn!”

My karate friend took his time to think a bit more, but eventually, he decided it wasn’t worth it. I couldn’t blame him because, apart from not being a headline, my accusation wasn’t backed up by any hard proof. If he only knew I came up with it just a minute ago!

“I don’t think so. It’s no good,” he informed me about his final decision. “You’ll have to clear your vocal cords and open your mouth wider if you want me to spill mine.”

“Yeah? You sure you don’t want me to clear your asshole by kicking you in the stomach instead?” I suddenly lost my temper because I felt deceived.

He promptly braced himself and took a karate posture like a fucking Bruce Lee.

“Okay, okay, relax! I’m just kidding!” I hurriedly shrugged and backed up. “I have no intention of breaking my knuckles fighting a useless battle. Chicks don’t like men with dried blood under their fingernails.”

The wretch looked at me peevishly and grunted. “Given your fucking attitude, I really doubt any chick would hook up with you, no matter what you have under your fingernails!”

I glared at him angrily, but that was all I did. I obviously couldn’t cope with this moron with enviable karate skills, especially after he demonstrated how painful his kicks were. That’s why I made a sulky face and turned around, choosing to withdraw with the remaining dignity I still had.

I walked to my car, sat inside, and released the emergency brake, after which I slowly drove backward for fifteen yards to park under the shadow of another tree. Then I took a cigarette out and looked around for my lighter. Since I couldn’t find it, I wondered where the hell it was and glanced through the car window to see if I hadn’t lost it outside. Then, I noticed something that made me realize how right I had been when I decided to retreat.

Clearly annoyed that a crowd of paparazzi had gathered outside the mansion, five threateningly looking thugs came out of the yard carrying baseball bats. After seeing them, I momentarily forgot I wanted to light a cigarette. Fortunately, I was far enough for them to get me, and when I said my decision had been right, I actually meant just that. This wasn’t the case for my poor “colleague,” though. Before I even had time to worry about him, the gorillas swooped on the bastard and started wrecking him and his car.

The proud owner of a black belt in karate didn’t even try to demonstrate some of his kicks. He was tragically aware of his helplessness and spared himself all the empty illusions and martial arts disappointments by obediently letting them smash him like a herd of buffaloes running over a toad.

Blood and glass shards were flying all around the place for nearly five minutes. The guy’s precious camera was disassembled into pieces, and every single one of them was pushed up his asshole. The thugs used the exposed film to tie his hands up and then walloped him for ten more minutes. After that, they stopped for a while to take a short rest, and only then did they finally notice my not-so-discreet presence in the area. I shyly waved my hand to greet them.

One of the mutants goggled his eyes at me and promptly left the group, carrying not one but two bats—one in each hand. Clearly, he was clever enough to realize he would need additional firepower to break my resistance, but unfortunately, he wasn’t wise enough to realize he was juggling his weapons rather recklessly. Since I had the intrusive feeling something terrible would happen to him very soon, I let him show off his skills, waiting in my car without taking any action. When he came about six yards from me, the presumptuous juggler whacked himself on the head with one of the bats so unexpectedly hard that he did a nearly impossible somersault and thudded heavily on the ground, almost five feet back on the road.

The rest of the thugs, who had so far impassively watched their colleague’s individual performance in rhythmic gymnastics with clubs, suddenly realized they were on the brink of losing their group competition. While bellowing like horny elephants, they threw themselves toward my car with the explicit intention of ripping my ass off and wrecking my Ford too. I didn’t know why, but they obviously held me responsible for their buddy’s failure and the vicious knockout he inflicted on himself.

I waited for them to come a little closer, expecting them to hurt themselves somehow, but when I deemed the situation impossible to develop four more times in the same way as before, I quickly started the engine and drove back as fast as I could. After that, I suddenly turned the wheel and briefly stomped on the brake before changing gears.

It all came out remarkably impressive. I did it just as they did it in Hollywood. There was a lot of smoke, car skidding, tires screeching—basically, everything you would expect from a good old-fashioned action movie. On top of that, my Ford endured the stress just fine, and the engine didn’t die in the most critical moment of my stunt.

Then I just stomped on the gas again and shot an entire fusillade of small pebbles into the thugs’ ugly faces, racing off in my car in a cloud of dust. I felt utterly revenged for their hostile intentions toward me, and after this small act of street justice, my good mood kept me elevated the entire way back to the city.

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