Not only did Otis Crown put down the knife. He allowed January to lock his men out of the double doors to her bedroom so that only he and she were inside.
“Why don’t you sit on the bed while I take a douche real quick? Adam’s just been all inside me. You deserve a fresh clean welcome all your own.”
“I’ll stand in the doorway and watch you do it,” he said.
“Fine,” January replied. Then, once they were in the bathroom and she was going about opening and using the box of douche solution—she managed to get her hands on the small, wrapped tampon-like vaginal garment that she’d loathed so emphatically.
“I have to say—you’ve got a really nice ass.”
“Thank you,” January giggled to distract him. Flexing the contours of her dynamite shape and pretending to use the douche paraphernalia, she quickly slid the Red Panty Kit into place.
“I can’t wait for you to get some of this pussy.”
~*~
“Help…get it off!” the grown man screamed in pain.
As tears ran down his cheeks, and with her pussy still wet, the beautiful Chinese temptress rolled off the bed naked and slipped back into her high heels. She was fascinated, not as much by his torrent of ear-drum bursting hollering, but more by the redness of the vein popping in the middle of his forehead.
“Get it off me! Get it off!”
“But aren’t you familiar with it?” Dao Ming asked. “It’s that little device you wanted to get rich off, remember—the one that can only be removed surgically? And of course if you hadn’t…raped me…me and Ling Mae that is. You wouldn’t be so—entrapped.”
The veins in his neck pulsing like worms, Noble Sinatra shouted to the top of his lungs, “You…fucking…bitch!”
~*~
Death and speed—February welcomed it.
Plowing across the grounds of the resort’s endless Mardi Gras festivities as fast as the fuel truck would go—she headed for the sliding glass entrance of Warm Leatherette’s central hotel.
By crashing into the lobby of the hotel, then setting off the explosives and blowing up the giant gasoline tanks—Critter had taught her that it would set off a chain reaction of explosions and fires all throughout the sinful paradise.
Only thing was—they hadn’t counted on Adam Crown being in that lobby.
On impact, February Foster saw him.
He was coming off the elevator, going to the information desk.
On impact—everybody screamed!
BOOOOSH!
Sheaths of walled glass shattered as though a giant ocean wave were pouring in! Adam Crown fell as from the driving cavity February’s eyes followed him. Little fires breaking out and the roof caving in like chunks of crashing boulder, the classic Grace Jones dance anthem that had once been February’s favorite to strip to kept right on playing—“Pull up to the Bumper, baby…in your long black limousine. Pull up to the bumper, baby…drive it in between”—BOOM, KAOS, BOOM, DESTRUCTION, BOOM…waters sprinklers.
February’s finger was on the blue button, twitching. Her mission was to ignite the explosives by pressing the blue button. This would blow her and the truck to smithereens.
But Adam Crown—he was standing up in the middle of the pandemonium; his eyes dead on February. His face blanched into the most readable shock as he realized immediately who the crazed looking black girl at the wheel of the truck was. Breathless, he simply muttered, “February.”
It was her.
Deep innocent brown eyes locked in a trance with Adam’s. The specter of time flashing before both their eyes as the lobby filled with dangerous white smoke—and then, with nothing left to live for—February pushed the button.
~*~
Crown Tires…Crown Magazine…the Crown Empire.
January Crown knew the moment that this old rotten dog climbed atop her body, it would all be hers.
By looking like her sister, she’d conquered the son by his heart. Now, just being January, she would destroy the father by his penis. Closing her eyes, the words of the doctor speaking at the board meeting came back to her:
“The inside of it is covered with thousands of sharp, inward-facing microscopic barbs. It is worn by a woman in her vagina just as she would a Tampon.”
This last time, January turned away from his kiss.
Otis Crown slid it inside.
“If an attacker were to attempt rape, his penis would enter the latex sheath and be snagged by the bards. During his attempts at withdrawal, he would be overcome with intense pain—reverberating throughout his central nervous system—which would give the victim time to escape.”
On the first attempt at stroking—the barbs dug into the shaft of Otis Crown’s penis causing murderous pain.
“The biggest benefit of the condom, however, is that once the attacker withdraws his penis from the victim’s vagina—the Red Panty remains attached to the attacker’s body. It can only be removed surgically. This establishes for the hospital emergency room staff that would have to remove it, and for the police, that a rape has occurred and that the person wearing the condom is the rapist. No more protracted drawn-out courtroom battles.”
Jumping up—hopping, screaming—pulling at the sheath but then letting go. Otis Crown looked like a big bear having an epileptic fit.
While finally have time to get her gun from her dresser, January stared in fascination as there was more hopping, uncontrollable shouting and screaming due to intense pain.
Then Otis’s goons—they kicked in the bedroom doors.
“Boss, boss—what’s wrong?” But there was nothing that could be done for him by then.
January Crown held her gun on them. She said, “You’d better get this rapist over to the emergency room right away. The Red Panty can only be removed surgically—and you don’t want him to lose anymore blood do you?”
~*~
As the blue button malfunctioned, February fought the VOICES. Nothing had blown up.
First in confusion, then desperation, February Foster pushed the button over and over again. But her death wasn’t to be. And as the VOICES were dimming, leaving her to where she couldn’t quite make them out—the man from her past, Adam Crown—he climbed up on the truck, ripping open the door on the driver’s side.
“Go away!” February screamed in horror!
“February, this building’s going to collapse. I have to get you out of here.
”No—don’t touch me!”
“Hold on to me!”
The fires, the rubble…February suddenly looked around and realized that she had dug something very insane out of her mind and made it a reality.
“Be still!” Adam ordered as he slapped her hard across the face.
With a gasp, February froze. It was Adam Crown and after all these years, she was back in his arms. As he carried her out with her face buried in his chest, she cried in a quivering voice, “Adam.”
~*~
An hour after the resort’s evacuation...KA-BOOM!
SUNSET
One Year Later
Though his wife was the strongest woman he’d ever known, Adam Crown braced her against his chest protectively.
Yves Malle was dead. Dao Ming’s recording career had taken a nosedive upon the public discovering her true identity; Fox Holden, increasingly an alcoholic, had coerced Jared Presser into marriage after being dropped from her record label—and worst of all, was the endless wreckage that sprawled before January’s eyes.
Large swaths of once green garden were now burnt black and skidded with charred objects. The sign saying “Welcome to Warm Leatherette” was unreadable and the bottom of what had been an Olympic sized swimming pool now looked like a meteor-hit black hole full of rubble and dirt. The steel beams of Papa Sinatra’s hotel were bent down like arthritic fingers. And for more than an acre, strewn rubble and plots of ash were washed over by the sound of a lonely, mocking ocean.
“I feel like I’ve lost my identity,” Janua
ry said.
“You can always rebuild. Just think of hurricane Katrina and how the city of New Orleans had to be rebuilt—think of Nine-Eleven and parts of New York City having to be rebuilt. It’s not impossible, January. And with Crown money, we can do it. We can rebuild Warm Leatherette bigger and better than it ever was.”
Lovingly, she looked at her husband’s handsome face. She said, “New Orleans is not the same as it was before Katrina, and neither would Warm Leatherette be. Besides…you know that my main obsession is getting February out of that Prison Mental Institution. There’s no proof that she ever killed anybody. And her memory is getting better and better.”
Adam understood January’s determination to save February. Just being there to witness the moment when January and May Day had discovered she was still alive had restored Adam’s faith in family love. The three women had held on to each other, kissing, crying and never letting anyone enter their circle of reunion for hours. Adam would never forget it. But of his father, Otis Crown, he couldn’t muster the same affinity.
The Crown family name had been completely demolished as a jury in California sentenced Otis to fifty years in prison for rape. This was just two months after Dao Ming saw to it that Noble Sinatra was sentenced to fifteen years for the same crime.
And now, just as Otis Crown had feared, January was running his empire; shocking her business colleagues by still refusing to put the Red Panty Kit on the American market; sending Adam off to race his cars and smugly ignoring Queenie’s vow to appeal the rape sentence and get Otis out of prison.
“You’ve won the battle, but not the war!” Queenie raged on a constant basis, but it was futile.
January had even used her power to create a career break for Deborah Crawford Gower by financing a movie based on the life of novelist Bliss Carrington and letting Deborah show all of Hollywood what she could do in the role. Though she didn’t win the Oscar for Best Actress, the important thing was that she’d been nominated. And now after divorcing her husband and leaving the soap, she’d married Buck Knuckle-Joy and bought a cottage on the beach.
“Her fans are going to give her hell for marrying a black man and she’d better watch out for Lorna,” Tiger told Adam and January. But what none of them knew about were the phone calls Deborah had recently started getting from her mother in Texas.
“I read in one of them fan magazines whur you said I was dead, Dennis—I ain’t dead.”
But considering the secrets Deborah had left in Texas, part of her wished her mother was dead.
“It’s just that once a person’s famous, mama, reporters start snoop’n around—digg’n where they ain’t got no business digg’n. I ain’t mean no harm by it.”
“Well I tell you one thing, Dennis,” said Bayleen Crawford. “Once they re-open that Warm Leatherette, I want you to invite me out to California. They is gone re-open it ain’t they?”
“Mama, you don’t need to be out here in California. I’m gone buy you a house once I make more money.”
“Oh for heaven sakes, Dennis, I’m not coming out there to live. I just want to see the re-opening of Warm Leatherette. I bet it’ll be even hotter than that Mardi Gras they had.”
“Stop calling me Dennis, goddamn it! My brother is dead, mama—he’s dead!”
“Hold on, Dennis. Somebody’s coming up on my porch.” As a dainty hand knocked against Bayleen’s screen door, she put down her glass of buttermilk and hollered out, “Who’s there?”
Her face hidden by the fedora, the sultry and hateful Lorna Sinatra responded in a faux southern accent, “Just somebody wanting to know if this old car out here on blocks is for sale.”
~*~
Holding hands, Adam and January Crown turned away from the wreckage and walked towards the sunset.
They had no knowledge of the two separate sets of eyes that watched their every move from far away.
“I’m serious Adam. I think this chapter in my life has closed once and for all.”
“What is that saying they had in Germany when Hitler would burn the books—if your book burns to ashes, write it a different way?” He looked at January, seriously. “The story as a business woman isn’t over. I can just see it now. ‘Warm Leatherette—The Reopening’.”
As the two separate and far-off pair of eyes watched them, January changed the subject. She said, “There’s been no word from the private investigator that I hired to locate Dao Ming.”
“If the Sinatra family is out to kill her as you seem to be convinced they are—I think it’s a good sign that even the best P.I. can’t track her.”
“You don’t put a Sinatra favorite son in prison for rape and live afterwards, Adam. Nobody realizes it, but Dao Ming and I go way back, she’s like a sister to me. They’re out to kill her and I’ve got to do something to protect her.”
“I bet if you reopened Warm Leatherette—she’d come back. Then you could protect her.”
~*~
Washington, D.C.
As the President of the United States turned away and began shaking hands with other colleagues, Senator Greg Merit of Vermont decided it was time for him to get to the airport. Part of his anxiousness stemmed from the fact that his wife’s leukemia was getting worse. Any day now, they planned to reveal to the American public that she had the dreadful disease.
Tall, handsome and blonde, the forty-seven year old Senator was skipping down the steps of the Capitol Building when out of the corner of his eye—he caught sight of her.
“Dao Ming!” he exclaimed, both shocked and excited.
More beautiful than the last time he’d seen her—eight years ago while performing at Warm Leatherette—the look on her face spoke of a woman desperate.
Discreetly, Greg went to her. “Dao Ming, what are you doing in Washington? What’s wrong?”
“I put Noble Sinatra in prison for rape. I knew when I did it that I would have to pay. But I had to, he raped my baby sister. Now the mafia’s after me. I honestly don’t know where to hide or what to do Greg.”
Tenderly, unable to resist, he touched the soft curve of her face. Dao Ming pushed his hand away, bitterly. She said, “Nothing has changed, Greg. I’m still a Chinese girl—not good enough to be a blue eyed Republican Senator from Vermont’s wife and not good enough to be the face of American music—I’m in the melting pot but they won’t let my slanty-eyed ass melt.”
~*~
Goodbye, Pismo Beach
Sea gulls circled; their bird’s eye view sensing that rare phenomenon of two hearts beating as one. It happened all the time in the animal kingdom—but amongst humans, it was rare, special and magical.
“I’m only four months pregnant, Adam!”
January laughed, rolling her eyes, as he playfully swathed her pregnant belly with the largeness of his hand. Even standing there in the ruins of what had been Warm Leatherette—the contagious joy of their love could not be denied. And now they meant to spread it to their baby.
“Shouldn’t this pot be fatter by now?”
“No, it should not.”
Affectionately, he tweaked her nose. And as he did it, one of the two separate sets of faraway eyes put down her binoculars with a cynical, jealous smirk.
It was Fox Holden, the one who wanted with all her heart to be the new January Crown. And some way, somehow, she was determined to make it come true. What else did she have to lose now that her music career had been exposed as a fluke?
“Your husband’s bisexual,” her brother Tiger had told her right before her wedding at the Justice of the Peace. “I caught him in bed with my boyfriend, E-Joe.”
“I don’t give a fuck if he’s a faggot, Tiger—I’m marrying him because he’s got money, capital! If I’m going to be like January, I’m going to need investors.”
“Be yourself, Fox.”
“Sorry, I can’t play that role. It’s never gotten me anywhere. But tell me something, big brother—how long does it usually take for a married man to
be ready to cheat on his wife?”
“Fox, you stay away from Adam Crown.”
“I can’t Tiger. I’m young and my story’s just beginning. I can’t live until I’ve had him—even if it’s just in my mouth.”
Like a spec of faraway dirt, Fox’s inner-drama meant nothing to Adam and January as they strolled hand in hand along the sea shore. At Dawson’s Reef, they stopped to kiss.
Swiftly, she was coming towards them, but neither one noticed.
Adam lifted January off her feet and twirled her around, whimsically. Happier than he’d ever been in his life, he said, “Whatever happens, goddess of my dreams, mother of my child…I want you to know now and forever that my heart can’t beat without you.”
“Is that a promise?”
“I live you to death.”
January laughed. “I live you to death—that’s the name of a hit song by Grace Jones, you know.”
“See there—another reason for you to reopen Warm Leatherette. But I say this time we build it on a tropical island.”
It all happened so fast—January’s stabbing!
February was supposed to be in the sanitarium. But out of the blue all of a sudden she was there on the beach—her arm rising, her hand wielding a butcher knife as she screamed and slashed emphatically, “Stop pretending to be me!”
•
ABOUT THE AUTHOR :
“TWEET” is a former model from Philadelphia. She likes her privacy and enjoys writing books.
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ALSO BY TWEET:
SEX ON PISMO BEACH by Tweet Page 24
