The Bare Bones

by Layla Wolfe

  I held the fake weed package out to Tanner. “Holy shit,” he said. “At the ranch we have dog treats named Scooby Bites.”

  Corey opened his eyes with a start and a sudden intake of breath like he’d been jump-started. He leaped into a sitting position. “What the fuck!” His hair was spiky with dirt, not fashion, and he seemed a feeble cohort for the Fentanyl King of Flagstaff. But I didn’t want to underestimate him, so I moved behind a corner of the apartment and watched.

  Tanner didn’t lower his piece. “What do you mean ‘what the fuck’? You’re the one who broke into my girlfriend’s apartment, you ballhead! Quit beating the devil around the stump.”

  But it seemed Corey couldn’t remember. “I did?” He looked around himself, so I had to duck my head behind the corner. “Whose apartment is this?”

  “Unity Mitford, and you fucking well know it. You’re on a bunch of that fake weed, that K2, Spice.”

  “Oh . . . yeah . . . “ It sounded like it was all coming back to Corey, so I peeked again. “Where is she? You’re just that dog guy from St. Louis.”

  “What do you want with her?”

  “Let me explain.” Corey got crookedly to his feet, and that’s when I saw the revolver jammed into his jeans waistband. It must’ve been my years of “training” with Gary, but instinctively I yelled out,

  “Gun!” and took three long-legged steps to tear it from Corey’s pants.

  I cocked the hammer and stuck out one trembling arm to point it at Corey.

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” he protested, holding up his hands and backing into the wall. “Oh, so you’re Unity.”

  “Why’d you break into my house?” I barked.

  Corey tried to laugh casually. “It’s all a total misunderstanding. See, ever since you accosted me in front of my apartment, I’ve been imagining you’re following me. I can’t understand why, so I thought coming in here might give me some light on the subject.” He was trembling almost as badly as I was, but I don’t think his was from nerves. Sweat dripped from his chin, although it was only about fifty degrees out and I never left the heat on when I went out.

  Tanner pressed him even harder against the wall just by waving his barrel. Corey turned his head to one side and emitted pained groans. He kind of snorted through his nose like a decomposing walker. What the hell did this K2 do to you? Why would someone prefer it over real weed? Just because you could get it at a 7-11? “Are you Tutti Morgan’s chemist? Do you make this shit?”

  “It’s all legal, yo!”

  Tanner shoved the barrel up Corey’s nose, like he was picking it with the metal tube. “Did Tutti send you here?”

  “Yo!” cried Corey, strangled. “He was pissed that the Bare Bones didn’t make any fentanyl order, so he decided to put all his eggs into this Scooby Bites biz!”

  I shouted, “Is he that desperate for money? He must have enough to retire ten times over by now.”

  “Oh God oh God oh God,” Corey started to pant, his eyes squeezed shut.

  Tanner persisted. “Are you behind the Illinois K2 deaths? Where were you shipping this crap from the FedEx by your apartment?”

  “Oh God oh God oh God.” Corey began to slide down the wall. Tanner held him up by taking a handful of his hoodie. But the guy was collapsing, or at least pretending to.

  “Is he faking it?” I asked.

  “Not sure.”

  “He looks like he’s having a seizure.”

  Sure enough, Corey’s eyes were flickering, rolling into his skull. His hands turned into claws and flailed about like a perverted R. Crumb character. Tanner tried following him with the barrel on his trip down the wall, keeping the metal stuck up his nose. When he gave up and withdrew the gun, Corey fell in a slump, still seizing.

  Frantically I yelled, “Did you drive Lavinia down to the University of Arizona?”

  Tanner picked up on the theme. “Did Tutti take her to the Grand Canyon?”

  We were a day late and a dollar short. I held the back of my hand to his open mouth. Nothing. I shook my head at Tanner.

  Holstering his piece in the back of his pants, Tanner whipped out his phone. “Wolf,” he dictated into his text. “Go to all the nearest gas stations until you find some K2 called Scooby Bites. Bring it to Lytton or his chemist to test for lethal compounds.” He thumbed the END button.

  I asked, “You think the K2 did this?”

  Tanner shrugged. “That, or some more bad fentanyl. Either way, his own boss created it.”

  “What’re we gonna do with this fucking body? We can’t call the cops.”

  “Indeed, we can’t,” Tanner agreed lightly. He reached a hand out to me, but it was only to take Corey’s gun. “First thing, we get your prints off this.” He headed toward the bathroom. I traipsed behind, a newbie to death in my own apartment.

  “Yeah, where are we going to put the gun?” I asked.

  Tanner cradled the piece in my bath towel, rubbing ardently on both sides. He grabbed a spray bottle of Lancôme off my 1950s sink and lightly misted the gun. Then he rubbed again. “We’re going to replace it in his pants when we bring his body back to Tutti. I’m getting sick of pussyfooting around this Fentanyl King ballhead. He’s been beating the devil around the stump this whole time. He hasn’t told us a single word of truth.”

  “We’re going . . . to Tutti’s compound?”

  Tanner shrugged. “Sure. Why not? What’ve we got to hide? It’s obvious we didn’t kill this anusbrain. Have you been to his compound?”

  “Oh, sure, for Lavinia’s bridal shower. But there’s an armed guard at the gate.”

  Holding the gun in the towel as if it were a turd, Tanner headed back to the living room. “He’ll let us in if he knows what’s good for him.”

  So much for sucking Tanner’s dick. Our affair wasn’t going smoothly by any accounts. Or did Tanner want an affair? Maybe, at the waterfall, he’d just wanted to display to me that certain men could be unselfish, that it was possible to put a woman’s needs first. Maybe he was just demonstrating one of his neurological ideas.

  Maybe he just wanted to show off his diddling skills. He was so ego-riddled, that could possibly be it.

  Then again, I was almost as ego-riddled if looked at in a certain light. I was a model. I wanted men to look at me and get off.

  Could I blame him? Still, he’d turned me down when I’d begged him to fuck. He needed to make this right.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Tanner

  We enlisted the Bare Bones’ help in getting the body down to my rental car.

  Bobo Segrist ran the Bum Steer, so he was around. Faux Pas was having a drink there after returning from a Banksy exhibit in Phoenix, so he helped. And Duji had just come from A Likely Story, in a rush to give a grandchild a copy of Where the Wild Things Are, so he just watched.

  “Reminds me of the old days,” remarked Duji. “All wrapped up in a rug.”

  “My only rug,” mourned Unity.

  “You’ll get it back,” I assured her.

  “I don’t think I want it back.”

  Faux Pas’ mood was light as he went down Unity’s side stairs with his rolled-up burden. “Remember that time we wanted to hang that Ochoa from that bridge as a warning sign but we had no rug to transport him?”

  Duji removed the cigarillo from his mouth. “Do I! We had the Bum Steer, so we wound up wrapping him a thousand times in Saran Wrap.”

  “When a pig stopped you,” reminisced Bobo, “you said you were playing a bondage game with your girlfriend.”

  Faux Pas said, “Good thing we cut a mouth hole to make it look realistic.”

  There was no doubt what Corey Shabazz was doing in our rug. We’d had to move a bunch of bikes from the alley to make room for my car, and Fox and Roman were engaged in keeping lookie-loos from staring down the alley. I’d backed the Honda in, but when we went to stuff Corey into the trunk, it became apparent I should’ve paid more for a mid-size versus a compact. The guy was a skinny runt, but he was tall.
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  “We’ll just have to do the back seat,” said Faux Pas.

  “Don’t speed or anything,” said Duji helpfully, gesturing with his cigar.

  “If we get pulled over, I’m saying I don’t know you,” said Unity, and I wasn’t sure if she was kidding or not.

  I wouldn’t blame her if she pretended not to know me. Associating with me had been nothing but a disaster for the luscious woman. Being on the receiving end of a fair to middling orgasm under the waterfall was no doubt the high point of her association with me. Everything else had been nothing but a bunch of sketchy blowback for the disappearance of her friend. What satisfaction had Unity even gotten out of it? We weren’t even sure Lavinia had fallen over a cliff. Maybe that was so much smoke like everything else, meant to distract us. Maybe Lavinia was in a giant vat of chemicals at Goodfella Ranch, Tutti’s compound where I now stupidly took Unity.

  “You shouldn’t come,” I said for the hundredth time as we drove down Bargain Boulevard.

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away.”

  “Look, I’m just delivering a body to the next of kin, as far as I know. I doubt we’re going to find out anything important.”

  “You never know. And Tutti’s a lot less liable to do something horrible to you if I’m there as a witness.”

  She was probably right, although it wasn’t in my code to bring women into the line of fire, to use them as human shields. I just lamely patted her thigh, and she put both her little hands on mine. We headed north on the highway toward Slide Rock State Park, where Bare Boner Sax Saxonburg had a house in the forest with his wife Bee and their daughter Zelda.

  More and more my mind had been turning toward creating a ranch out there. I really only had two employees running Hang Town Ranch in St. Louis—Curly and Josie, another vet with PTSD who was recovering from a suicide attempt when I grabbed her to rehab on the ranch. The Bare Bones were starting to feel like a brotherhood to me. Down to a man, they were accepting of who I was, even my haphazard life’s story. Duji and Ford had joked about making me a Prospect, although I didn’t know how I could do that, run the ranch, and go to med school. And, at age forty-two, I was a little old for that, although Sax had done it at forty-five. The whole possibility boggled my mind.

  After awhile, it became evident that Unity’s hand on my thigh was doing more than comfort me. Her fingers were a mere inch away from my cock, where arteries deep inside were dilating rapidly. Channels opened and blood rushed in. I knew from scientific study that millions of little pockets in the two spongy tubes—corpus cavernosum—were filling with blood, puffing my cock to embarrassing proportions. And I knew from looking in the rearview that Unity was avidly watching her handiwork. The corners of her mouth were lifted in that sly little smile.

  The more she squeezed, the more nitric oxide—the very stuff of Viagra—was released by arteries in my dick. Knowing the scientific side of it didn’t make it any less sexy. I wondered where she intended to go with this. Was she going to jack my dick like she’d done under the waterfall, my load splattering our faces? We were approaching sunset and I wasn’t opposed to this idea, so I let out a few groans when her hand clamped down over my erection. I rotated my hips as if to get more comfortable in the seat.

  “You’ve got a big, juicy prick, Tanner,” she said, matter of fact, squeezing my hard-on like it was a puppy.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  Wrong reaction. She withdrew her hand as though she’d been burned.

  “Why do you do that?” she cried, clearly hurt. “Why do you act so arrogant as though it doesn’t cost me a lot to compliment you?”

  Oh Law! Had I made a big mistake. I grabbed her wrist with my right hand. “No, no, my queen! I didn’t mean it that way.” Oh yeah? Then what way did I mean it? “I just meant that, you know, in the air force and all, people have been known to—“

  “Oh, give me a break! So your fellow cadets or whatever they call themselves wander around in the shower room admiring your penis?”

  That gave me an idea. I shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  She calmed down instantly. “What . . . “

  “What do I mean? I’m talking hot man-on-man action in the showers, that’s what I’m talking.”

  She inhaled sharply. “In the . . . air force?”

  “Sure, why not? We’re men. We can do whatever we want. And sometimes we’re away from women.”

  “So, a guy would come up and say ‘hey, Sergeant Tanner, you sure do have a nice tasty hose, let me suck on it?”

  “Exactly,” I said casually, as though it’d happened every day. It’d happened exactly once, and it was that once I intended on talking about, if it would keep Unity close to me.

  It worked. She walked her hand back to my erection and clamped down over it. She snuggled so close her shoulder bobbled mine, and she squeezed the entirety of my cock in her palm. Stress soared inside my tube, creating the same pressure as a boa constrictor suffocating its prey. I helped her out by unbuckling my belt. Her little hand did the buttons.

  “Tell me more. He was in the shower? So he got down on his knees?”

  “Right. There wasn’t much to it. He just gobbled me up like he hadn’t eaten in a week and hoovered away.”

  She shimmied her tits against my bicep now. It was going to snow that night, but Unity managed to still display a good amount of side boob, for which I was grateful. Before my dick even popped out into the air, I’d spurted some pre-come drops. She used this blob of jizz to smooth over my cockhead, giving slickness to her pumping.

  “Was anyone watching?”

  “Not at first. I guess my groaning brought curious people running.” That was true. The suction was so sudden and unexpected—and it’d been so long since I’d been blown—I just growled mightily like a lion. Suddenly it didn’t matter that it was a guy on his knees giving me such erotic sensations. Suddenly it was my entire world, and the lusty encouragements of my fellow airmen only added to the quick buildup.

  Now Unity used two hands—one to massage my balls, which she’d brought out into the light of day. She spit ladylike into her palm and applied it to my ballsac, and jizz surged, again glistening the slit. Doctors called this “the point of no return.” No shit. Any second now I was going to spew my load, and if it hit the windshield we might be in trouble. A very tiny part of my brain looked for the windshield wiper switch.

  “So they were into it too?”

  “Why not? I guess the guy had done it before to some of them. He was like a mascot, a sexy gay mascot for desperate horny men.”

  “So you were hard?”

  “Are you kidding? A little less hard than I am now.”

  Unity rubbed her entire breast against my bicep. “I’ve never seen a dick this big. Except, you know, in Triple Exposure films.”

  “What’s that? Oh Law, Unity, I’m going to bean you right in the eye.”

  “Good,” she purred, and jacked me even harder.

  That was it. A starburst of muscle contractions rippled through my scrotum. Bladder, balls, anal ring, and most of all, that sacred and holy p-spot, the prostate gland that trembled before the almighty sword of Unity’s live-giving hand.

  Luckily I was still on the straight part of the road, or I certainly would’ve veered off into a fucking ditch. I had to remember to force my eyes open, as they naturally wanted to squeeze shut so I could revel in the utter bliss of my throbbing member.

  When Unity laughed, it sounded a half mile away. The cocksucker in the shower was a million miles away. I forced myself to come to as the spasms slowed. I looked around to see where I’d blasted my load, but it was too dark. Someone had replaced a veil on the world while I was selfishly jizzing all over the place. My eyes adjusting, I saw some of it in Unity’s hair, on her chin. I laughed somewhat sheepishly when a viscous blob dripped from the tip of her dimpled chin. She laughed, wiping it with the back of her hand.

  “You know when I did that by the waterfall?” she asked. “That was the fi
rst time I’d ever done that to a man.”

  “You’re kidding,” I blurted, without thinking. “I mean, I just pictured you having a shit ton of boyfriends, and . . . “

  “Not really. Almost none, in fact. I mean, men get all over me at ganja events. Because I wear a thong or a tank top with nothing beneath it, they think they can just grab.”

  Irritation roiled in the pit of my stomach. “You need a bodyguard.”

  “I do. I have a few guys I sometimes bring with me. But if it’s an out of state event, I can’t afford to pay another guy’s plane fare and hotel.”

  “If you had a husband, he’d go with you.”

  She giggled, girlish. “Okay. I’ll get a husband just to get a free bodyguard.”

  “You’re going to have to tell me where to go from here.”

  “Keep going up North Fort Valley Road. His spread isn’t marked very well for obvious reasons. There’s a weird skiing billboard right before it.”

  So we turned after the weird skiing billboard, and predictably there was a locked gate with an intercom. Tutti didn’t even answer the intercom, a security guard did. Although I’m sure Tutti was watching the camera himself.

  I barked, “Tell Tutti Tanner and Unity are here with Corey Shabazz.”

  There was some back and forth, then Tutti himself got on the line. “I don’t see Corey in your car.”

  I said, “That’s because he’s rolled up in a rug in the back seat.”

  Silence for a few seconds. Then the gate silently opened.

  It was pitch black out by now, and with no lights to guide the way, I had to make decisions by the light of my headlamps and Unity’s memory of visiting Lavinia.

  I stopped the car. “What the fuck is that?”

  “Oh,” said Unity in a small voice. “Those are caged roosters, about sixty of them. He brings them out to the sideshows and stages cockfights.”

  I shuddered. “Oh Law. That’s disgusting as hell. People like to see this shit?”

  “I guess low-budget ghetto people do. They bet on the fights. See, there are little metal spurs he puts on the birds, and he injects them with steroids. They can’t be rehabbed. Hurts me to look at them. I say they should be put out of their misery. There’s a beaten-up pit bull too living in filth.”