(Hats off to Robert Beck, Romeo Muller and Robert Devereaux)
I: Outside the Federline Plant (Ghostbury, California – December 23)
Slick tooted a hit of coke out of his thumb-sized plastic bullet, snapping down its lid as he snorted loudly.
Lana, sitting next to him in the front passenger seat, blew him, anticipating Slick’s jerky hip and arm movements.
He came in her mouth, quick, as usual.
Nowhere near as big or long-lasting as Reggie, thought Lana, hating Reggie, her ex-pimp, anew.
Reggie, along with his top ho, Foxy, had brought her to this personal low, turning tricks for Slick, her hot-tempered, high-yellow pimp — so unlike Reggie, dark and cool.
Lana watched Slick. Slick gazed back at her, glaze-eyed.
“Feel better, Slick?” the hard-faced, dirty-blonde asked, after she’d rolled down the window and spat Slick’s bitter jizz onto the snow.
She wiped her frost-blasted face with a rag. Sensing Slick’s shivery scowl, she rolled up the window.
Slick grinned, and studied Lana’s blackened eye – it was the result of a fight with Foxy, a rival ho, two weeks back. “Yeah. Call the old man and tell him when and where.”
“Yes, Slick,” Lana murmured, again wishing it was Reggie she’d just blown.
* * * * *
Reggie Williams was on his track, his pimp territory, in a coffee shop on the corner of East 14th and Edgewater Avenue, when his cell phone rang. A Curtis Mayfield tune filled the room, drawing ghetto-eye glances to him and Foxy.
“Speak,” he growled.
His coal-dark face tensed as he listened. Foxy, Reggie’s top bitch and Amazonian beautiful muscle, also tensed as she watched him.
“I’ll be there,” he snapped. His cell phone beeped in response to him tapping the cell phone’s ‘end’ button.
Seeing Foxy’s look, he said, “That was Lana.”
Reggie continued. “Slick wants a midnight meet, the Federline Plant in the warehouse district. He’s making noises about a truce.”
“You know it’s a trap, Reg.”
Reggie smiled, eyes mirthless.
“S’okay, Foxy,” Reggie reassured his top bitch, patting her knee. “That punk-ass nigger thinks he’s smart, but we both know better, don’t we?”
“I know you used to be G.I. Gook-killer and all, but I should come along. Zawanda can keep an eye on the other girls.”
“No, you keep an eye on them. Zawanda’s honest about what she sees the bitches make, but she misses a lot. I make more money when you’re on the track.”
Foxy nodded, grateful to work for Reggie. He was fair, smart, and generous for a pimp. For girls who worked with him longer than six months, he withheld a small portion of his girls’ money and set up bank accounts for them, so they had something to live on when they were out of the Game: most hos were drummed out of the Life in less than five years, broke, drug-addled and unfit for straight life.
“Call L’il Six for backup. His presence might keep Slick in line,” Foxy frowned. “Slick’s intent on causing a street war — why make it easier for him?”
Reggie smiled. “Bringing Six along sends the message that I can’t handle my shit, you know that.”
“Yeah.” Foxy studied her empty coffee cup. She wanted to argue further, but there were limits to a pimp-ho relationship, even one as tight and long as theirs.
Reggie, as if sensing Foxy’s thoughts, said, “I’ve got to do this alone, to show that boy for what he is: a pretender to the Game. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Okay, Reg,” Foxy said softly.
* * * * *
Foxy watched several of Reggie’s girls shout and strut their wares to male johns who slowed their cars, rolling through tire sloshed snow.
Alexa, a recent turn-out culled from the nearby Greyhound bus station, was doing especially well tonight. Big-breasted and blond, she was starting to get the hang of things.
Foxy wondered how Reggie was faring. If he hadn’t made any stops, he should be arriving at the meet in the next few minutes.
A meet that will get him killed, her gut roiled. Foxy trusted her gut; it rarely steered her wrong. In this Life, guts, street smarts and a handy boot blade contributed heavily to one’s survival.
If she called L’il Six — a friendly, rival pimp who’d entered the Game with Reggie, twenty years ago – Reggie might see it as betrayal, and, possibly worse, as a lack of faith.
Reggie wasn’t big on beating his girls, or even snuffing “fools” (as he called them), but he wasn’t above it. He preferred his punishments to be more psychological and monetary.
He’s worth the risk, she decided. Watching Zawanda’s big booty slip into a gray Nova, Foxy dialed L’il Six on her cell phone.
His phone rang a few times, went to voice mail.
Shit!, Foxy cursed.
When the standard female voice was done, and the beep heard, Foxy said, “Six, this is Foxy. Call me ASAP. This is an emergency.”
* * * * *
A few minutes later.
Reggie’s car rolled up in front of the Federline Plant, snow crunching beneath his rolling tires.
He turned off the heater and the car. Slipping his keys into his coat pocket, he extracted his Nine from the other as he got out, quietly shutting the driver side door.
A body lay in the snow to his right, twenty feet away: L’il Six, his chest bloody and blasted. L’il Six’s mahogany dark face was frozen gray beneath the street lights.
Reggie scanned the area, saw two sets of tire tracks leading into a darkened nook behind the left side of the manufacturing plant.
Reggie’s grip on his Nine tightened. Get out of here, he thought.
“You’re not leaving are you, old man?” Slick’s braying voice froze Reggie.
Reggie turned to face Slick, and his inevitable lackeys.
Slick, buffed-out in a fur-lined winter jacket and assorted thug ware, stood fifteen feet away.
Lana, her gaze hateful, stood next to Slick. Reggie had dropped Lana from his stable after she’d attacked Foxy, hoping to score Foxy’s top-ho position.
Foxy, classier, smarter and tougher, had knocked out Lana.
To Slick’s left was Darin Turner, beat cop who patrolled Slick and Reggie’s tracks. Turner’s pig-like face and greedy gaze was colder than snow.
Their breaths misted the air. Reggie kept his Nine trained on Turner, who returned Reggie’s sentiments, pointing his pistol at Reggie. Neither Slick nor Lana evidenced weapons.
Reggie laughed. “Let me guess. You’re going to pin Six’s murder on me after you kill me, right? Slick, you’re a no-talent spitter who fancies himself a player — go back to making your whack albums, and your wife, if she’ll have you. And, you, Turner, you Oreo ho-fucker — I’ve been paying you more than anybody else has for years, and now this small timer turns your head?”
Reggie paused, warned Turner. “If you cast your lot with Slick, ghetto snow will be red with blood. Profits will be lost.”
Reggie’s logic scored its target: uncertainty flicked across Turner’s face.
Lana, glaring, looked like she wanted to say something. Slick, without turning around, silenced her with a forefinger in front of her face.
“I’m talking to a dead man,” Slick grinned.
Reggie smiled. “See you soon.”
Keeping his eyes on the trio — and guessing there were more armed fools lurking about — Reggie slowly backed away, toward his car.
If I get out of here intact, Foxy gets a steak dinner and the best fuck I can give her, he vowed.
He was close to the car when Turner fired, his shot set Reggie’s chest afire. Gasping, Reggie went down, his return fire scoring Turner’s thigh.
Turner cursed, his squeal laced with pain, outrage.
Reggie laughed, gurgling and spitting blood, as he collapsed into chilling wet.
Got you, you Uncle Tom piece of shit, he thought, rasping heated bile, blood and wooziness.
Footsteps, one person, approaching.
Slick, standing over him, grinned. Turner’s gun was in his hand, pointed at Reggie’s head.
“Goodbye, old man.”
Reggie laughed, for reasons he couldn’t name.
Slick fired.
II: Outside the Federline Plant (Ghostbury, California — December 23 — one year later)
Luke and Luanne, ten years old, stood back and studied their handiwork.
“Using that pink pimp hat for the snowman was a good idea,” Luke decided.
“It was,” Luanne, Luke’s mocha-skinned twin, agreed.
“Let’s go home. I’m hungry,” he smiled at his sister.
* * * * *
An hour later.
“Billy, check this out! That snowman is wearing a Goodwill pimp hat!” Johnny Ferrara exclaimed, laughing.
Billy, drunk on his mother’s cheap vodka, grinned at his eighteen year old schoolmate as he pulled out the black, seven-inch floppy dong and balls out of his jacket pocket.
He had swiped it from Eupornia, a porn store on Edgwater Avenue, intending to use it for some future, unspecified prank.
Billy, his weasel-like eyes glittering, attached it to the snowman. He inserted its flat base between the snowman’s boots, which rested on the snow, as if the snowman were sitting.
“The snowman has a dick now!” he laughed.
Billy wasn’t finished with the snowman. He unzipped his pants and peed on the snowman, his piss arcing high at first, creating a melted urine jag down the snowman’s left cheek and upper chest.
He finished, zipped up, moved away from the snowman.
Johnny laughed again, soft slushing sounds as they staggered toward Billy’s space-heatered trailer, to watch one of Billy’s mom’s old movies, Merry Ho Ho Hos, and whack off to it with Billy, before his mom got home from her waitressing job, over on East 14th.
Billy’s mom, eighteen years later and post-porn, was still hot, with those big titties, bottle-blond hair and blowjob lips.
Maybe one day I’ll fuck her, Johnny smiled. I couldn’t let Billy know about it, though. He’d kill me slow and vicious-like, the way he does his neighbors’ pets!
Johnny grew hard. He resisted the urge to touch himself.
Later, he told himself.
* * * * *
Midnight.
Reggie’s initial sensations were that of a gut-forming, soul-deep chill, and thickening: wooden arms and legs swelling, fusing into his frozen three-snowball body. His carrot-stick nose fused itself into his red-eyed, coal-mouthed face; his hat – what it looked like, he couldn’t tell, fused itself to the top of his head.
Reggie looked down and grinned. He had a black, veiny, floppy seven-inch cock.
What the — ? he thought, seconds before the violent circumstances of his death caused him to clutch his wanting-to-explode head: hot bullets, internal darkness edging in as he, laughing, fought death and chill, outside the Federline Plant — where he was now.
Federline Plant, this exact spot — the site of my death and bizarre rebirth.
Reggie looked down at his thick wooden legs and feet, covered by leaking trashed Doc Marten boots. The front and back sole edges of the boots curled outward, letting in wet snow – not that it mattered to Reggie.
I came back, he marveled. I’m a snowman — like Frosty!
No, he smiled, his coal-lumpy lips curving. Snow is soft. I’m not soft, I’m ice hard: still a player – wait, that’s what I’ll call myself — Frostbite the Ice Pimp! Now to find Foxy, and get some vengeance. And. . . why do I keep smelling piss?
* * * * *
12:20 A.M.
Johnny Ferrara stumbled home, half-sober, not quite vomitous, and tired, from Billy’s trailer.
Johnny’s mom, working a double-security shift at a local furniture warehouse, wouldn’t even know where he’d been, or when he got home. His father was long gone, having fled when he found out that she was knocked up with Johnny.
His dick, chafed, still ached from watching videotaped guys and other women get blown by, jizz on, and ass-pound Billy’s mom. His head throbbed, even with the three Ibuprofen capsules he’d washed down with water.
He was cold, sweaty. Frozen damp seeped into his hiking boots, making his sopped-sock feet wet, and making him miserable.
It’s that snowman that Billy and I decorated How –
The snowman continued to walk towards Johnny, its piss-jagged scar and plastic rubied eyes startling under hell-red Christmas trailer lights. When it was ten feet away from him, it turned to look at Johnny, its seven-inch cock flopping.
“You got a cell phone I can borrow?” it said, in a gravelly voice.
Johnny yelped and ran, as fast as he could, toward his apartment. Given how much snow was on the ground, it wasn’t fast enough to suit him.
Frostbite watched the boy flee. Twenty feet later, the boy stopped, and, breathing hard, vomited in the snow.
Frostbite laughed. Serves the little bastard right, running like that.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, he stood outside Zawanda and Foxy’s trailer. He rapped on the front door with his thick wooden knuckles.
A few minutes later, the door opened. Zawanda’s round, sleepy face was belied by her belligerent stare, and the pistol in hand.
It was pointed at Frostbite.
“You best take off that fucked-up costume, and tell me who you are, otherwise you’re gonna be a lead-filled motherfucker,” she snarled.
“It’s me — Frost — uh, Reggie,” he said.
Zawanda laughed sharply, the gun still trained on Reggie.
“Who’s at the door, Wanda?” Foxy’s voice, edged with interrupted slumber, came from behind Zawanda.
“Some sick piece of shit pretending to be Reggie,” Zawanda replied. “No matter, though, because he’s about to be a dead piece of shit.”
“Look, Wanda, I know it’s weird, but it’s really me,” Frostbite growled, in his Jimmy-Durante-gargling-rocks voice. “Remember when I turned you out, you were living with your alcoholic mom and your stepdad, who was molesting your little sister – ”
“How do you know that?” interrupted Zawanda, her belligerence wavering. “Only Reggie — ”
“The first time we made love was in my Caddy, five years ago. You wanted to do some cane before we did, but I was firm about that shit. I told you, ‘No ho of mine is going to get strung out on that, or any other shit. No way, no how.’ ”
Zawanda’s gun barrel tilted toward the porch steps, her mouth agape.
Foxy thrust her head out from behind Zawanda, who, shorter, stepped aside to let her peer out.
Frostbite said, “And you, Foxy, the last conversation we had was inside the coffee shop, about how Slick – through Lana — was leading me into a trap. You begged me to call L’il Six — ”
At the mention of his dead friend, Frostbite’s breath hitched. He continued. “But I went anyway.”
Foxy stared at Frostbite, startled by his pitch-black cock and scrotum.
“Take off that suit, Reggie,” Zawanda said, her eyes teary. “Tell us where you’ve been for the past year.”
“I can’t. Turner and Slick killed me after they killed L’il Six. A little while ago, I woke up in this body.”
Foxy’s gaze had moved up to his face. She made a vertical slashing motion on the right side of her face. “You have a scar,” she said. “It looks like dribbled something wet and yellow on you.”
“Like piss?” Reggie frowned. “That would explain a lot. Oh, my name is Frostbite, now – as in ‘the ice pimp who’s going to plant Slick, Lana and Turner.'”
“O-kay.” Zawanda separated her wide-eyed surprise into two syllables.
Foxy laughed.
* * * * *
Foxy and Zawanda, bundled in winter clothes, sat on the porch beneath the snow-sagged metal awning over their porch and yard. They faced Frostbite, who stood a ways from the red glow space heater they huddled near.
Both of the women’s gazes often strayed to his swelling genitals.
The ends of Frostbite’s coal mouth upturned into a smile. “I woke up with that. Can’t help the ho-sticks; they just happen.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” snorted Foxy. “Still, your junk is more impressive than most.”
“I don’t have time for fucking, baby,” chuckled Frostbite. “Revenge is the priority. I don’t know how much longer I got before I go away.”
“Go away?” frowned Zawanda.
“Seasons change – meaning: inevitable meltage for this well-hung pimpmeister. Also, if I came back like this, it would seem like anything is possible. . . What are my least favorite wanksta, bitch and pig doing these days?”
“Slick’s usually at his club, Slick o’ Love. He lives there, on the third floor,” Zawanda said. “That what Alexa says. She works there, as a stripper.”
Frostbite frowned. “You’re both out of the Game? You’re straight?”
“Yeah,” Foxy replied. “After you were kil – disappeared – for a time, your lawyer, via your instructions, got in touch with us, gave us access to the post-Game accounts you’d set up for us.”
Zawanda beamed at him, teary-eyed.
Frostbite shot her a pimp-cool look.
Foxy continued. “I completed the junior college courses I was taking when you disappeared, and now I’m a ‘cube farmer’ at a property management firm in Ghostbury. They call me by my legal name, Vanessa,” Foxy snorted, misting the air. Wanda works as a hair dresser in a nearby shop.”
“We have you to thank for that,” Zawanda said, softly.
“I helped,” acknowledged Frostbite. “But you earned it. We all benefited from that.”
Zawanda looked confused.
“‘Happy hos, are honest, productive hos,'” Foxy smiled, reiterating one of Reggie’s old lines.
“Got that right, bitch,” Frostbite said, affection in his gravelly voice. “Now, how do I get to Slick, Turner and Lana?”
“We’ll have to talk to Alexa about Slick. Lana’s still one of Slick’s girls. She strips and hooks, though she’s still trying to backstab her way to top ho status. Alexa hates her, and so does Slick, judging by the way he treats her,” Foxy laughed. Zawanda followed suit.
Frostbite waited for their voluble, night-misting humor to subside.
“Turner is still on the street,” continued Foxy. “He was promoted to plainclothes detective shortly after you disappeared.”
Zawanda, frowning, asked, “Do you know where they buried you and L’il Six?”
“I don’t. Maybe I’ll pummel it out of them before they die.”
His ex-hos, their cheeks wintry, smiled.
“Alexa lives in a trailer down the way,” Foxy said, shivering.
Zawanda glanced at Foxy.
Frostbite said, “Let’s get over there, then.”
* * * * *
Foxy and Zawanda walked on either side of Frostbite, his half-erection swinging from side to side.
It was a quiet night, the stars twinkling. Lights were on here and there, but nobody else was out.
Better for me, thought Frostbite. The less people that see me walking around —
Foxy distracted him from his thoughts when she stopped, ducked down, and ran her fingertips along the base of his cock.
It stiffened noticeably.
Noting this, she smiled. “I had to make sure. We missed you. All the girls, even the ones who went to other pimps, said you were the best.”
“I understand,” Frostbite said. “I love you, too, bitches.”
Zawanda and Foxy, without looking at each other, slipped their hands into his knotty-knuckled branch hands. He reacted to their gesture by gently, briefly squeezing their hands.
It struck Frostbite that his relationships with his ex-hos had changed, not in a bad way.
They had reached Alexa’s trailer. Unlike Zawanda and Foxy’s camper, its awning was cracked, leaking.
Foxy knocked on the door.
The lights came on, followed by a baby’s wail, and a woman’s muted cursing. The sound of stamping feet drew closer to the door.
Frostbite looked askance at his ex-hos.
“She has a trick baby. Turns out she was a month along when you left. Named the kid after you, Reginald William, with her surname, Lawson,” Foxy said, smiling.
Frostbite smiled, pimp sure.
The door was violently opened. “What. The. Fuck. It’s one-fifteen in the goddamn morning. I just got that little fucker to sleep!”
Alexa, her blond hair disheveled, was livid. Her huge pale breasts threatened to spill loose from the thin sleeping gown she wore.
An elderly woman’s voice came from within the trailer, between the infant’s wailing. “Is everything all right? Who is it, Alex?”
“Nobody, Mom. Can you please take care of Reggie, while I deal with this?”
The sounds of footfalls came from the trailer; the baby’s crying abated in volume.
“What do you want?” Alexa asked. “You’re not in the habit of coming over in the middle of the night. So it must be important.”
Her stare dared them to gainsay her assumption.
“It is,” Zawanda smiled at her. “You better get dressed and come outside for a few minutes.”
“Why?” Alexa asked. “It’s fucking freezing out here. Come inside — ”
“Do it,” Frostbite commanded, stepping into Zawanda’s view.
Alexa’s jaw-dropped, fearful look became one of recognition. Her face was refulgent. “Reggie?”
Foxy remembered that Alexa believed in reincarnation. This is going to be easier than I thought, she smiled.
* * * * *
A few minutes later, Alexa stood in her tiny yard with Zawanda, Foxy and Frostbite, while they filled her in on Frostbite’s situation.
“We’re all in, then?” he asked them when they were done. “There’s no shame in bowing out – this is my fight, not a bitch fight.”
“Well, maybe not on your part,” Alexa smirked. “As for the cop, Slick and that treacherous, mule-faced slitch . .”
They all smiled at that. Alexa went inside to get dressed and to tell her mom that she had to leave because important business had come up.
* * * * *
They headed over to Foxy and Zawanda’s trailer.
“Do any of you need to call in sick at your jobs?” he asked them.
His ex-hos looked surprised at the question – it was still difficult not to think of him as their pimp – and smiled at each other.
“Wanda and I have the next two days off,” Foxy said.
“I’ll call the club manager later, to let him know I’m not coming in,” Alexa said, shivering in her winter coat. “If all goes well, I’ll be working at one of the other strip joints next week.”
“Did you get the weapons and cash I had stored under my house?” Frostbite directed his question at Foxy and Zawanda.
“We did, after your lawyer gave us the sealed envelope with the house map and trunk keys,” Zawanda replied. “We put the money in a bank box, haven’t touched it since. The guns and hand grenades are still in the locked trunk, under my bed.”
Frostbite nodded. “Given my possible time constraints, how hard would it be to isolate our targets?”
“The pig hits on me all the time at the club,” Alexa said, amused. “He gave me his business card with his cell phone number. ‘Call me, anytime,’ he says. . .”
“What about Slick and Lana?”
Alexa fielded the question again. “Slick spends most of his time at the club, often in his ‘ghetto fabulous’ penthouse on the top — third — floor. Lana acts like a clingy pet when he’s around, and a royal slitch when he’s not. She stays with him even when he kicks her to the curb to bust a nut in other stripper-hos. I was told he makes her watch while he does it, just to see her suffer.”
They had arrived at Zawanda and Foxy’s trailer, its front yard surrounded by a seven-foot high wooden fence.
Once inside the yard, Foxy unlocked the front door of the trailer and brought out the small space heater; she placed it on the blocky steps where she and her chosen family crowded tightly around it while it creaked to metallic, red-bar life.
Frostbite sat on a snowy tree stump a foot and a half away.
For a moment, nobody said anything; only the misting of breaths was seen or heard.
“I have a plan,” the snowman said. He looked directly and at Zawanda and Foxy and instructed them, “Get the weapons.”
They went inside to retrieve the trunks. He turned his attention to Alexa.
“You have Turner’s number on you?”
Alexa snorted. “I wouldn’t have mentioned it if I didn’t.”
“Call him,” he said. “Say you shot a date in self-defense, when he tried to rape you. You don’t want to go to the cops because the guy you killed is ‘connected.’ Say that if he helps you, you’ll do ‘anything‘ he wants.”
“Where should I have him meet me?”
When he told her, she laughed. “Perfect.”
* * * * *
They waited in a darkened nook to the left of the Federline Plant — the same area where Turner, Slick and Lana had waited for Reggie a year ago, before murdering him.
The girls huddled in the heated cab of Foxy’s pick-up truck, while their ex-pimp sat in the snow near them, ready to toss pebbles at the back of the truck when Turner showed up.
The detective had initially been put out by the hour, and reluctant to help Alexa, but — as Frostbite had predicted — his interest was perked when she’d told him about her fictional “connected” attacker.
“I’ll do anything,” she’d whimpered over the phone, “Help me, Darin!”
She’d set her cell phone to speaker so Frostbite, Zawanda and Foxy, who were quiet, could hear what Turner said.
“Okay,” Turner had eventually agreed. “I’m on my way.”
“Thank you,” Alexa had sighed, sounding relieved, before ending the call.
Now, twenty minutes later, Turner still hadn’t arrived.
Headlights approached the plant, from its long, curving driveway.
Frostbite tossed a pebble loudly onto the back bed of the truck, and slunk back into the shadowy trees where he couldn’t be seen.
Alexa, her blond hair disheveled, stumbled out of the nook, in blue jeans and a ripped, thin-cloth white blouse, in which her nipple-erect breasts were exposed. She looked terrified as she fell to the ground, where she’d be seen by the approaching motorist, likely Turner.
The luxury-model SUV pulled up next to Alexa. Its driver exited it, without shutting it off.
“Are you okay? Where is he?” Turner asked her as he limped toward Alexa, and lightly grasping her arm. His piggish gaze drilled into her exposed cleavage.
Turner wore a navy blue shirt and navy blue pants.
Frostbite stepped out from between the trees. His Nine blasted the startled oinker in his right knee, causing him to squeal with pain, while Alexa scrambled out of the way.
“You fucking whore! You set me up!” Rolling on the ground, he reached for his gun in his shoulder holster.
Frostbite stunned him with a hard kick to the head before he could grip his heater. Alexa, leaning down, retrieved Turner’s weapon, and stepped away.
Foxy and Zawanda, who’d been standing by with their guns drawn, showed themselves.
“That were for L’il Six,” Frostbite said. “Try that again, and you die slow, you Uncle Tom fuck.”
Turner squeals stopped. His dark eyes went wide; his gaze lingered for a second at the pendulous black cock between Frosbite’s legs before flicking back up to the snowman’s face. “I know you! But it can’t —”
The snowman laughed, a ragged edge to his risibility. “‘Call me Frostbite.'”
He turned towards the women. Alexa, who’d put on a bulky winter coat, handed him a length of rope.
He knelt down and hog-tied Turner; when the detective tried to thrash out of Frostbite’s bone-crushing wooden grip, the snow pimp punched him in his face, bloodying and crunching his nose and knocking him out.
A moment later, Frostbite was finished. With one hand, he hoisted the unconscious cop up by his taut, flesh-abrasive bindings.
The ice pimp carried him over to the truck, and dropped him in the back of it. Frostbite hopped up to squat next to him. The peeling edges of his Doc Martens touched Turner’s forehead.
He covered the cop with a ratty, smelly blanket. He told his women, “We can drop Alexa home on the way to Slick’s club. One of you should drive Turner’s SUV there, also. Remember to wear your gloves when you’re doing so.”
Alexa looked hurt.
“I don’t want to expose you unnecessary risk,” he told her. “Your baby needs his mother.”
“But. . .”
“You’ll see me again,” he stated with certainty, knowing it might be a lie.
She bowed her head. “All right — Reggie.”
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, they were parked in the mostly empty back lot behind Slick’s neon-lit club, near its back doors. A few cars were parked here and there, including Slick’s town car, but it looked like everybody was inside the building.
Frostbite pressed Turner’s cell phone to one of the hog-tied cop’s ears, and hissed, “It’s ringing. Say it right and you might live.”
Turner’s porcine face was ashen, reminding the ice pimp of L’il Six’s, after he’d died. Sadness, mingled with acidic-swallow rage, swept over him.
The phone rang.
Foxy, grim-faced, pressed the barrel of her Nine into Turner’s shattered knee, caressing its tender nerve endings.
Turner breathed harder, threatening to hyperventilate, just as Slick’s voice brayed from the speaker-set cell phone.
“What is it, Turner?”
Foxy made like she was going to press her Nine barrel into his knee. Eyes wide, Turner shook his head at her.
“It’s Reggie! He’s back! I got waylaid at the Federline Plant, but managed to escape – ”
“Are you high, Turner?” the thug said, irritated. “I thought you didn’t do drugs.”
“I swear! If you don’t get out here and help me – owwwww! – ”
Foxy had, once again, pressed her the business end of her Nine into his viscous, bluing knee shards.
“What’s going on, Turner?” Slick’s bray had become a whine. In the background, they heard Lana coo, “What’s the matter, baby?”
“Can’t you see I’m talking on the goddamn phone?” Slick berated her.
“But. . .” she whimpered.
“Just get here!” Turner howled. Seeing Foxy’s warning look, he added, “Bring Lana! She’s part of this, too.”
“Sure,” Slick’s voice had become cool, deadly. “We’re on our way.”
He hung up.
Frostbite’s coal mouth was set in a serious line. “Slick knows something’s up. That’s okay. He doesn’t know we’re right outside.”
Foxy opened one of the truck doors. Zawanda, sitting inside it, handed her a machete, which Foxy passed to Frostbite.
Turner groaned, “You said you’d let me go. ”
Frostbite, his rubied eyes fiendish in red neon drench, said, “Where did you and Slick bury our bodies – mine and L’il Six’s?”
“I don’t know. Two of his guys took care of that. I was gone when they – ”
Frostbite sliced open Turner’s rotund belly with the machete.
The pig’s rank offal spilled out from the cut, gray and night-dull on the ice slick tarp covering the back of the truck.
Turner, trembling, gargling and spitting up blackish fluid, died a moment later.
“You should move the truck closer to Slick’s town car,” Frostbite said, his voice thick with emotion.
Foxy and Zawanda looked away from their ex-pimp. Their grips tightened on their guns as they re-holstered them and got in the truck.
Frostbite, machete in hand, trudged towards Slick’s car.
* * * * *
Moments later, the back exit door slammed open. Light, whiter and sharper than the neon sign above the doorway, spilled out onto the salted, snow-dissolved steps that led down to the parking lot.
A bald, tall, bulky Mexican in a business suit and overcoat visually scanned the parking lot. Seeing no threats, he turned around, nodded, stepped aside and held the door open for Slick, who breezed past him, his high-yellow expression one of familiar arrogance.
Lana, her equine face evincing concern, followed him. She wore orange hot pants, which her expanded booty stretched to an unsexy max, and a low-cut top, whence her sickly pale breasts swelled out. A puffy winter jacket completed her outfit, which was especially ghetto, compared to Slick’s fur-lined coat and tight-cut thug suit.
The year has not been kind to her, Frostbite decided, peering out from behind a car to watch them make their way towards him. To his left was Slick’s car, with its gold rims and personalized license plate, PIMP01.
They were close, their deep, snow-crunching footsteps a few feet away.
One, two, three! Frostbite counted, before stepping out into plain view, his machete swooshing through the air.
His blade lopped Mexican’s head off, crimson spurting from his severed neck stump, just as his headless body fell to the ground.
At the same time, Foxy stepped out from behind another car, and, facing Lana, blasted her in the face with Turner’s heater. The squalling ho went down.
Zawanda’s shot went wide, missing Slick completely – why, Frostbite didn’t know, it wasn’t important. What was important was that they put Slick down before he fought back.
Slick was stupefied, not so much by the attack, it seemed, but, rather, by Frostbite’s appearance. He regained his senses quickly, though, and reached inside his fur coat for his heater.
His hand cannon, big for his hand, came out, ready to blaze, but too late: Frostbite smashed him in the face with the butt of his machete, even as Foxy blasted one of his knee caps.
Slick fell, screaming, to the freezing ground. His weapon flew through the air. It landed in the snow with a muted thump near his grille-gory ho.
Zawanda, flushed with embarrassment at her wild shot, handed Frostbite another coil of rope from the nearby truck. He placed his machete in her gloved hand, began hog-tying the screaming pimp.
“Let’s go,” he directed his ex-bitches. He smiled his forgiveness at Zawanda.
“What are you?” Slick cackled, specks of pinkish blood in the snow. ” ‘Frosty the dong pimp’? Why do you smell like piss – ”
He screamed when Frostbite, coal lips curved into a smile, bent his shattered-knee leg back to finish tying him up.
“Knock him out,” Frostbite said, weariness in his gravelly voice. “I’m tired of listening to this profligate nigger.”
“No problem,” Zawanda said, cocking her arm back to machete butt-bash the back of Slick’s head.
A shot went off. The smell of cordite grew more pervasive; a hole appeared in Zawanda’s midsection, right before an expanding bloodstain appeared there, as well. She hit the ground face-first.
“You fucking bitch!” Lana screamed, right behind her, a gory hole where her left eye used to be. Slick’s hand cannon lay where she’d dropped it after firing it, near where she lay in the pink-spackled snow – the recoil from his gun must have knocked her backward.
Foxy, outraged, placed two more bullets in the screaming whore’s head, reducing her face to red pulp and skull fragments.
“Try coming back from that, you horse-faced cunt,” she muttered, tears appearing in her eyes. She fell to her knees next to her breathless, longtime friend, and began to sob.
Frostbite, stunned, watched all this.
Slick’s cackling bray brought the ice pimp back to reality. “Lana whacked your girl!”
Frostbite ignored the wanksta’s taunt.
“Where did you bury our bodies – mine and L’il Six’s?” the ruby-orbed ice pimp asked, briefly squeezing the keening small-timer’s shattered knee with his hard wooden hand.
Slick stopped keening and spat on Frostbite’s jagged chest scar. “I’m not going to tell you shit – ”
Frostbite, with his other hand, twisted Slick’s head, snapping his neck.
The ice pimp stood up. Touching Foxy’s broad shoulder, he said, “We’ve got to go.”
Foxy took a few seconds to regain herself; she got up.
“Can we take her with us?” she sniffled, embracing him, taking comfort in his bone-chill proximity. His dong swelled against her leg and the inside of her thigh.
She looked up at him and smiled, her dark eyes filled with a new, comforting certainty.
“Of course,” he responded, affection warming his gruff voice; he’d answered two questions, one of them unspoken. He stepped away from her, hopped onto back of the truck and tossed Turner’s gut-stench corpse onto the ground next to Slick.
He untied the corners of the tarp, folded them into blood-crusted square, placed it in corner, and leapt next to Zawanda’s body. Squatting, his jet-black prick still semi-erect, and placed his thick, wooden arms beneath Zawanda’s neck and knees, and picked her up.
While Frostbite, sick with sorrow, tenderly wrapped her body with the ratty blanket, Foxy, still wearing gloves, tossed Turner’s gun near his corpse. This wasn’t her first shoot-out; it probably wouldn’t be her last.
She got in the driver’s seat, closed the driver’s side door, started the truck, and drove away, with Frostbite sitting in the back.
In the distance, cop sirens wailed. Frostbite Foxy weren’t concerned. They’d be long gone before the pigs arrived on the scene.
* * * * *
Frostbite dug a hole near his death site, guesstimating that Slick, or whoever, hadn’t buried his body too far from the Federline Plant. He placed Zawanda in the cold hole and filled it, while Foxy wept.
Foxy drove them to her trailer – strange to think of it as hers, not hers and Wanda’s, she said – to make love in her fenced-in front yard, under the wide porch awning.
Wearing a puffy winter jacket over a sash-tied robe, she coated his urine jag scar with some of his old cologne, to cover his piss smell. She did this using a clean thick paint brush.
When he saw the the cologne bottle, he laughed, a little sad. “Nostalgic, aren’t you,” he said.
“I missed you,” she replied, holding his crimson gaze. “I’d fall asleep to this smell, fingering myself. . .” She smiled, seductive, as she untied her robe sash. “Now I don’t have to pretend.”
He laid on his back, while she placed a layer of towels on her lover’s glacial thighs, so her legs wouldn’t freeze while he was inside her.
She’d placed her space heater nearby, close enough to keep her from getting too cold, but far enough to not melt him, either. While the heat made him uncomfortable, it was a small price to pay to be inside his best bitch again.
They laughed when she bumped her head against the rim of his pink pimp hat. He slid his warm lubed dong into her, mid-laughter, making her sigh, groan, as she rode her spectacularly endowed lover, breathing in his mild musk.
“Does it hurt?” he asked her.
“Yes, but in a good way,” she smiled, shivering slightly. “I’m fucking you for both of us.”
He nodded, aware that Foxy’s “us” included Zawanda, not himself.
He carefully pinched her cold purplish nipples, big even for her tall Amazonian frame, while she sucked on his carrot nose.
She came before he did, rocking, quivering and whimpering — some of it was attributable to the cold, no doubt — their breaths clouding the early morning air. He came just as she, exhausted from the events of the night and a second, breast-bouncing orgasm, began to dismount his warm, pussy coated ho stick.
“I can feel you pulsating inside me,” she said, sliding her pussy back down to, squeezing, his scrotum, compressed with rapturous, pumping seed.
Their mingled juices ran down the insides of her legs when she dismounted his shrunken member.
“I’ve been fucked good, Daddy,” she smiled, kissing the tip of his nose. “But I’m exhausted and freezing my tits off.”
She only called him Daddy after multiple orgasms, which he’d often provided for her and others, in his former life.
Foxy went inside to clean, warm and dress herself. Ten minutes later, she came out. “What happens now?” she asked him.
” I’ll stay here as long as I can. When I melt, keep my stuff. As long as my body’s missing, I should be able to return if you build a snowman, with those items, near the front entrance of the plant. Kind of like Frosty, in those Christmas specials.”
Foxy, her face beautiful in dawn’s faint light, asked, “I’ve got to ask: what’s death like?”
“A long, dreamless sleep. Once the pain goes – being shot is a motherfucker — it’s. . . warm, womb-like, almost as good being inside you.”
Her smile, verging on laughter, made him ache with mingled want and sadness. “Merry Christmas, baby,” he said, a hitch in his Jimmy Durant-gargling-stones voice.
© 2012 Chuck Lovepoe. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.
Bio: Chuck Lovepoe, also published under the name Steve Isaak, lives in California. He is the author of the anthologies “Charge of the scarlet b-sides: microsex stories & poems” and “Behind the wheel: selected poems.” (Both are available at Lulu.com). He is also the author/editor of www.readingbypublight.blogspot.com and the multi-author www.microstoryaweek.blogspot.com.