✝ (mariachi) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-01-05 22:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast, buffy summers |
who: amy & open.
where: the venetian casino.
when: night.
what: she's been elected as the official follower-arounder of a potential human trafficker. joy.
warnings: not yet.
“He’s been running from us for a long time. Been real successful at it too, ‘cause cops’re useless—all they care about’s speeding tickets and fucking disorderly conduct.”
His voice was a vintage political Bob Dylan ballad and he smelled like tapestries and rituals. She imagined his eyes were stolen from the Emerald City; that where troubles melt like lemon drops, away above the chimney tops, Oz was searching endlessly for them. Yet here he was, with gold dust cleaved from the yellow brick road splattering the veins of his shoulder length, loose hair, dripping freedom like a sailor’s heart. Sitting in Kurt Cobain’s puppy-colored cardigan and jeans from the buffalo exchange. She was in a trance; bare elbow leaned on top the purple arm of an antique (+ thrifted) chair that fit only her, and a venti-salted caramel mocha, with soy, betwixt her knobby, mermaid green corduroy knees. She hoped nobody could see thru her grey American apparel triblend T – ‘cause her heart was all over the place, and cupid’s arrow was sticking out of it.
But when she really looked at him, she knew this wasn’t a fairy tale.
“Right.” Jason, her co-worker, had spoken up during her enchantment—it was mainly he and the client’s conversation anyway—and she but an innocent bystander to this tale of scarlet letters and human trafficking, remained silent. She felt enough like part of the décor to adopt the belief that she was rendered temporarily invisible. After all, this was her chair. And Jason continued, in that business-ey way he gets, with all that concerned furrowing and brotherly love. “This guy tried to talk your sister into working for him. Working meaning, so that we’re all clear here, having sex with sweaty balding dudes with hairy stomachs and aviators, at the tender age of thirteen – am I mistaken?”
“Yep.”
“Well, we only kinda do P.I. stuff, but my idea is that she follows him around. Sees if he makes any passes on local jailbait, or leads us to some human trafficking hive. She can FaceTime at the casino since they’ve got WiFi and we’ve got all the passwords there. Or even like, record a video or something. Maybe even conversate. If he tried something like this, he’s tried it before.”—Both little boy blue’s eyes and Jason’s cast on her like wishful runes, as if she held their fortunes somewhere, like a stowaway daffodil, in the pale thicket of her messy hair. She’d been busying herself chipping even more of her chipped pin-up red nail polish off with the front of her teeth, wondering if this Starbucks coffee container thingie was microwave safe because damn, this was getting cold. And yuck. What was this underneath her nail? It looked like—wait...
“Huh? Follow who?” she fluttered as if noticing that they were talking to her was misty and made things hard to see. “Who are we talking about?” yes, take another sip of coffee. This was alleviating the responsibility of the whole speaking thing, unless, “Are we talking about Jack White? Because I’d love to follow him around. He just got a divorce and I am SO in there.”
Two hours later at the Venetian… No. No they weren’t talking about her secret boyfriend Jack White. They were talking about the pasty, chain-smoking, and salty man with the gold rings, the partially tinted aviators that hardly hid his rat-eyes, with the animal tuft of greasy black hair poking out of the chest of his bruise-blue velour jumpsuit. He was doing the half-zip thing with his jacket, letting the healthy gray wife-beater peek out like a crooked tooth. Because of that alone should he be prosecuted, so she thought, as she sat at a nearby slot machine, flattered that she’d got carded by one of the fishnet girls in vinyl heels who brought her a black Russian.
Ivan, the man she was ‘watching’ was playing a very serious looking, long ass game of poker over there and she was rocking in the boat of her third black Russian, when nature gave its twitter and it was time to stretch her sea legs.
No arrows. No doors with skirted stick figures. This was Hell, it had to be. She asked the first person who passed her, “Hey, do you know where the bathroom is? If I needed a Phantom of the Opera commemorative mug I’d be in luck, but I don't... They're gaudy.”