“I just busted a big case and I wanted to celebrate. I made a bundle. Don’t worry, I’m not a cop. Sort of a cross between a private dick and a spy.” He was moving along now, attracting her self-interest, greed, adding a dollop of mystery.

“Geez, I don’t know. What time?”

“About ten minutes or sooner. I got a hardon. I’ll try to save it for you.”

“Johnny, you’re crazy!” He loved her merry peal of laughter.

While he waited he read some nasty letters in Penthouse to further goad his lust. Reality was amazing: one minute he was having a nervous breakdown, and the next moment he broke through the soup of despondency with a clean hammerlock on the future. Had that sacred summer solstice night in the forest imbued him with new powers, he wondered? It was possible. The slump only fueled the reaffirmation. He quickly passed over a series of enema letters. Warlock had never understood how anyone could think that peepee and caca were sexy.

It was just short of a half hour before Aurora’s knock. He welcomed her with his dingo wobbling out the front of his terry cloth robe. She dove on it with a wonderful shriek of laughter. The dog growled and he scored a direct disciplinary hit with Diana’s bird book. He eased her panties off and drove his head up under her skirt. Some are brownish and some are pinkish. Pourquoi?

Chapter 27

A day passed. A night passed. Then another day and another night. Saturday dawned as the lovers slept. Saturday after Saturn, that vast globy iceberg in the heavens. A day of saturnalia for many a wage earner but not for Warlock who, frankly, was fucked out. If you were the unattractive ceiling fixture in the motel room you would see him strung out precariously along the edge of the mattress as if trying to escape her within the boundaries of sleep; this quasi-Indian, this hyperthyroid vixen, this crazed schoolmarm from Melvindale, a suburb of Detroit, named oddly after a pioneer who went by the handle of Marvin.

It hadn’t been all beer and skittles. Rabun had partially broken cover by giving the lawyer from Detroit the motel phone number.

“Feingold here, Rabun’s lawyer. I just Leared up from Metro. I’m over with the state police now. Good work. Get over to the post. The Luce County prosecutor’s on his way.”

“No.” At the time Warlock had been preoccupied with a trinket Aurora had selected from the many at a porn store.

“No, what?”

“I’m under orders not to break cover. You have all the information you need.”

“Don’t be absurd. What’s that buzzing sound?”

“I’m at a barber shop. Hear?” He withdrew the trinket and held it to the phone for an unnecessary length of time. “Did you hear it?”

“Are you crazy?”