When Squire and Carl returned, all hotted up from proving their marksmanship, Ava announced a surprise. She had reserved us rooms at the mouse’s hotel. We’d have a few cocktails, go on some rides, and see what developed. This made Carl happy, but Squire and Leeli didn’t seem to care. I sucked down a third forty on the ride over and after Ava checked us in, I told her I felt poorly and was going to my room.
“Me, too,” said Leeli. “I’m awful tired.”
This surprised Ava as much as it did me. “You sure?” she said to Leeli. “Space Mountain’ll juice you right up.”
“Naw, we’ll catch y’all later.” Leeli started walking so fast, she beat me to the elevator.
I had a shower while Leeli ordered room service cheeseburgers and Cokes. The food left me placid and sleepy. I laid out on the bed in my skivvies and Leeli stood at the window, her arms folded, stern of face, like she was taking stock of a brightly lit country she’d just done conquering.
“You don’t have to worry ’bout me making a move, that’s what’s keeping you vertical,” I said. “I’m through for today.”
She made a noise that didn’t tell me much.
I grabbed the remote from the bedside table and found a wrestling show on TV. Wrestling hasn’t been the same since the prime of Hulk Hogan and the Giant and Macho Man Savage, you ask me. Back in the day your superhero had a gut just like the asshole sitting next to you in the bar and so when you smacked him with a beer bottle, you had a greater sense of accomplishment. Now there was too many pretty boys and it was more tumbling and role-playing than the honest-to-God fake it once was.
Leeli wriggled out of her jeans. “Ava gave me money to buy clothes,” she said. “Reckon we better do it soon.”
“We can get some fine clothes here. Get us some mouse shirts and mouse hats with the ears. Maybe you can get some panties with the mouse on the crotch and wear ’em inside out.”
She pulled off her tank top and threw it at me in a ball. “You always have to be a shit?”
“It was a fucking joke! Jesus!”
She stared at me as if she didn’t believe it.
“I swear,” I said.
She held the stare a second longer. “Damn!” she said. “Why do I like you?”
“You want an honest answer?”
“Naw, I know why.” She sat down on the bed, glum as old gravy, picked up the remote and went surfing, changing channels so fast, there was only little blurts of sound. “Know what Ava told me? She says she works for the government. The FBI.”
“No shit! I said. Is she a friend of Spiderman?”
“She showed me her badge!” Leeli bugged her eyes and stuck out her tongue.
“Give me ten bucks and I’ll show you a badge. I can probably find one in the gift shop.”
Leeli threw herself down on the pillow like she was trying to hurt herself. “You wanna hear this or not?”
“Sure. Lemme have it.” I turned to lie facing her so she’d know I was listening, and rested a hand on her waist.
“She said she was an agent and Carl and Squire are in some sorta experiment. She’s in charge of ’em. She says she’ll pay me a ton of money to be part of it. The experiment.”
“Want me to say what I’m thinking?”
“I’m not an idiot! I know she likes me, and I know it could all be a story. But she’s willing to pay twenty thousand dollars! For one month!”
“You see the money?”
Leeli gave a vigorous nod. “I get five now, the rest after.”
“Well, shit.” I rolled onto my back. “I guess this is goodbye.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Yeah, necessarily. I can’t compete with someone throws around twenty thousand bucks.”
She sat up cross-legged and muted the TV. “Look, I’m not no shiny apple been sitting on the shelf like you think.”
“That ain’t what I think,” I said, grumpy from losing out to a rich dyke.
“Then why you treating me like I don’t know which end of a jar to open? I been with women. It ain’t my favorite, but there’s times I felt that way. And I can feel that way again. Enough to earn us twenty thousand dollars, I can.”
The word “us” punched a hole in my overcast.
“I don’t trust Ava,” Leeli said. “But with you along I don’t have to trust her. So I told her you had to come with us.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said it’d be okay ’long as you don’t get crazy ’bout I’m sleeping with the both of you.”
I turned this proposition over to see if it was missing a piece. “I don’t know,” I said. “I get these mood swings.”
“Oh, really! I couldn’t tell.” She flounced down beside me, resting her chin on my chest. “Can you deal with it? ’Cause if you can’t, I might not do this. But I want that money! You imagine the party we could have on twenty thousand? I bet we can get more’n twenty, you ease back and lemme treat Ava right.”
I hooked my thumb under the waistband of her panties and gave the elastic a snap. “You a bad woman, ain’tcha?”
“Goodness me!” She batted her eyelashes. “I don’t know what in the world more I’m gonna have to do to prove it.”
In the morning we had another conversation. It kicked off wrong when I said what bothered me was Ava offering twenty when she could have snagged Leeli for less. Once I got her cooled down, she said, huffily, “It’s not like she was comparison shopping. She’s took with me. Guess you’d have trouble understanding that.”
“You know that ain’t it. I’m just being a realist.”
“That’s what a realist is? A pea-brained Florida cracker?”
“Damn, Leeli! Some guy offered me twenty grand to go party with him for a month, you’d think something was screwy.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe my ass!”
A polite room service knock ended this round. The waiter, a college boy with a forelock of frosted hair, rolled his cart to the table at the window, off-loaded Leeli’s omelette and my breakfast steak, and stood waiting for his tip.
“I got no cash on me,” I told him.
“You can add it to the bill, sir.”
This was spoken like he was advising a backward child who’d stepped in shit. He had the kind of smug, fleshy face made me yearn to see it staring up from inside a roll of sheet plastic, dripping wet from a canal where he’d been swimming underwater for a week. I snatched the bill from him and wrote one billion dollars on the tip line. His eyes flicked to the amount and froze.
“I was you, hoss,” I said, “I’d polish up one of them special Disney smiles and waltz on outa here.”
I guess he wasn’t a total candy-ass. He had some size on him and I could tell he was weighing job security against the joys of bashing my face in with one of those metal domes that kept the food warm. I thought about sucker-punching him just to see how far he’d fly, but he turned on his heel and headed for the door.