She threw the bloody piece of boa at him. He tried to shift out of the way, but it hit him in the shoulder. “Respect this, asshole! It wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t making his life so goddamned difficult. You should have seen your face when you told him the car had been stolen! You shrugged! Another day at the office? Is that what you thought? You should have heard him downstairs! If you had, you would have crapped in your Frederick’s of Hollywood pantyhose. Now gimme that goddamned ice!”

“Does this mean you’ve changed sides?”

“Let’s say that I’m trying to listen to reason.”

He gave her a little half-smile as he turned to the refrigerator, as if to say he wasn’t being fooled — which in fact, may have meant that he was. Not that it mattered: she wasn’t going to play games with him, too. She ran a bar towel under the cold water while he made an icepack with another. He put it in front of her. She opened the icepack to extract a single cube and spat a mouthful of blood in the wet towel and wedged the cube against the inside of her cheek and folded the icepack again. Gregory regarded the towel, then scooped the bloody boa from the floor. Amy took the moment to look herself over in the mirror behind the back bar. A bruise was purpling under her eye opposite the cut in her mouth. One lump or two? She was going to wind up looking like George Foreman on a long night unless she learned to slip Chino’s jab. When Gregory looked at her again, his expression was almost blissful.

“You’ll say I helped you?”

As she moved away from the bar Amy pointed to the bloody towel and the boa. “Couldn’t have done it without you, Punkins. Now I’m going to go lie down for awhile.”

She headed for the door, almost smiling to herself as she thought the width of the trail she had left behind. Chino would have no trouble finding her. In the hall she tried to sashay like Mae West. Gregory’s telephone was ringing again. “Call me when you get work,” she tried to say in Mae West’s voice. The cut in her mouth made her sound terrible, not even close. She tried again, with one of West’s own lines: “Caught between two evils, I usually pick the one I haven’t tried.”

Not around here, she thought. One of these geeks was as bad as the other. They might as well be the same geek. She almost couldn’t wait to get her hands on Chino again. He wanted crazy? She’d give him crazy! She’d cut his dick off and sew it in his mouth, if he hit her again.

She would do worse than that, if she could figure out what that was.