Page 72 of Making His Bones

“My friend,” Faux Pas said, in his thick, dripping French accent. His curly collar-length hair and pirate’s earring betrayed that he was a founding member of our club. “You will see your pretty lady soon enough. Remember. Bare Bones do not act like little kids. We are dignified men.”

“Sorry,” I said, eyes downcast, practically toeing some sand like a schoolboy.

“Babe!” Elektra yelled, leaping up and down out in the alley.

Eventually I shoved enough people aside to reach her. Flinging our arms around each other, I squeezed the life’s blood from her.

“Babe, babe, babe,” I murmured into her hair. Even though she smelled like airplane exhaust and other acrid airplane molecules—and probably the fetid stench of a courtroom—I worshiped the ground she walked on, and her hair was soft and wavy.

“I missed you so much.”

I realized her voice was choked and that I was the one doing it, so I released my grip a little. I had to set her back down on her feet. But I kept my palms around her jaw, squeezing until her eyes bulged.

“Oh God,” I said, “I want you to tell me everything about the trial, I swear I really do. But first I want to fuck the stuffing out of you.”

It may sound incredible, but we hadn’t actually fucked yet. We were saving it for some big, dramatic moment, and that moment had certainly arrived. We were having enough fun with the preliminaries, if you know what I mean.

“Okay,” she agreed, eyes shining, “but where?”

“Slushy’s office.”

There was no hesitation, no argument. I grabbed her hand to yank her inside, but now Knoxie was yelling.

“Man! You’ll never believe the shit Kneecap was claiming! He talked about the leftover hamburgers they had for dinner, corn on the cob—“

“Cheesy potatoes,” added Fox.

“—and they watched TV before she let him put on the Bengals.”

“Then she kissed him,” said Unity, “and said she was going upstairs to take a bath.”

I knew I should listen to all of this, but I was far too horny. Elektra had been gone over a week. I’d just been running the Hip Quiver, “throwing sticks,” and teaching archery. I was ready to blow a hole through her.

I was pretty tall, so I easily found Slushy in the room that was like Sardinesville. The more people drank, the less they were allowed to shoot arrows, and by now even Santiago Slayer had joined the party. Insisting on something in a martini glass, he looked down the cleavage of a Bone Licker, the sweetbutts of the club.

“Slushy,” I shouted at the lawyer, who was holding a giant pair of scissors to cut a ribbon. We obviously weren’t having a grand opening of the Hip Quiver or anything, but Slushy loved to cut ribbons, so we strung one across the sales room and said it was congratulation to the hacktivists for bringing down the perverts.

“Gray!” yelled Slushy. “I want to get in on this hagfish thing of yours. It really sounds like an up and coming thing.”

“No problem! I’ll talk to you about it after you let me and Elektra into your office.” I wiggled my eyebrows like another sort of sicko, and of course Slushy got the picture.

“Okay,” he said, threading his way through the packed, leather-clad populace, “but promise me you won’t look in my filing cabinet.”

Elektra said, “That’s not where I feel like looking.”

“I just don’t want you being compromised,” said Slushy, ushering us into his dark office. He didn’t turn on any lights. Alley light came from some high windows. “If you were to read some of the cases I’m defending, you’d be party to them. Conscience gets expensive.”

“No worries,” I said, eying the desk covered with papers. “Do these papers need to be here?”

Slushy frowned. “There’s a thing called a floor, buddy!”

I didn’t want to press my luck. “All right. We’ll discuss hagfish later.”

Slushy pointed at me. “There’s no honor among thieves. Except us, of course.”

I splayed my hand against my chest. “Of course.”

Elektra saluted him, and he was gone.