Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (8 page)

Would the 
Suerte
 see him as a tasty morsel or a poison pill? No one knew them well enough to guess.

Suarez had his vision a hundred and fifty years ago, but he is still alive. Apparently he has not even aged much. The shell technology that can now be used to effectively confer immortality upon those who can afford it was only perfected in the last twenty years, so no one can explain how he does it.

Certainly, I have no explanation. I’m forced to wonder if maybe he’s just lucky.

I’m still reading when someone calls me at 22:00. I fish my kaikki out of my pants pocket and thumb the receive button while continuing to scan a document on the holo.

“Burroughs.”

“Missssster Burroughs,” says a familiar voice, drawing out the sibilant hiss in a playful way.

“Porsche,” I say, trying to cover my surprise “what can I do for you?”

“Now 
that’s
 the question I’ve been waiting to hear you ask!” She sounds like she’s in a mischievous mood, both perky and evil, possibly high. “Are you in bed yet?”

“Technically, yes.”

“Technically 
yum
,” she says. “Then what you can do for me is let me come up.”

“You’re here?”

“Yeah, I’m calling from your lobby.” The video chime sounds as she adds a camera feed to the call and I glance at the screen. She sweeps her kaikki quickly around her to show me where she is—I have a brief, blurred view of the lobby from behind the locked door that restricts access to the elevators and the residential part of the building, then I see Jung Jing Road behind her, and then her face -- that face.

I like to think I’m an intelligent person, but from time to time I provide evidence to the contrary, or maybe some things are just outside the realm of intelligence and stupidity—in the territory of chemicals, bodily fluids, and primordial psychological structures. Whatever the case, I dial the code to let her into the interior lobby.

At the door I hesitate, but only briefly, then open it. This time she’s dressed in an imitation of me, of all things, with a tight wife-beater showing off her breasts and military green cargo pants. The pants are slung low on her hips in such a way that I get a glimpse of her belly and one pelvic bone. Incongruously, she smells like orange blossoms. I close the door and turn to find her inspecting my condo.

“You’ve done wonders with the place,” she says. Her tone is mocking, but softened with a bit of humor.

“Yeah, well most of my earnings go back into the company.”

“Ambitious.”

For once she seems impressed.

“You shouldn’t be here.”

She moves closer to me and the orange scent wafts over me.

“You want me to be though.”

“You still shouldn’t be.”

“Let me ask you a hypothetical question.”

“Okay.”

“Okay. If we were to fuck like hyenas in every possible position known to humans, would you take me off your list of suspects?”

“No. You know I wouldn’t.”

“That’s right,” she says, apparently pleased. “And if we were to fuck like horny virgin teenagers until you couldn’t see straight and then you found out I was guilty, would you still arrest me?”

I don’t like where this is going, but at the same time I do, too.

“I’d have you arrested,” I say, “I just wouldn’t do it myself.”

“Right. So if I take my clothes off right now and we do what we both want 
so
 
much
 to do, it really doesn’t make any difference to anything, does it?”

Her logic is impeccable, no doubt practiced on a hundred, maybe a thousand men before. I stare into that catty, carnal face. Her pupils are dilated with something that is sure to make her proposition every bit as good as it sounds.

“No, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” I say, reciting my lines like a good boy.

She pulls her top off over her head, exposing breasts that have been designed by a team of psychologists and surgeons to elicit the maximum possible arousal in a man. They are large, but not artificial looking, and as she shifts slightly they sway in a deliciously pliable way. Then she surprises me by lowering herself slowly to her knees.

“Come here. Please.”

She smiles a smile at me that is so full of lust and delight that it drags all my teenage fantasies out of memory and loads them into my brain like a program. I move toward her.

She catches my pants by the belt loops and pulls my pelvis against her face, rubbing herself against it like a cat. I feel myself get hard under the pressure and she makes small, muffled sounds into my pants when she feels it too. Her fingers find my zipper and open it, then unbutton the waist. She runs her mouth up and down my cock, still sheathed in underwear, which is somehow almost sexier than if it was bare, then takes the underwear carefully between her teeth and pulls downward until they drop over my hips, taking my pants with them. With calculated slowness she takes my cock in her mouth and begins to move her head back and forth while her tongue circles me, creating suction, then releasing it again. She withdraws it and begins rubbing her face against me again, this time with nothing between us.

“I have a girlfriend you know,” she says.

“Is she going to be jealous?”

She laughs, but continues her frottage, now and then twining her tongue around my cock.

“No soldier boy, she won’t be mad, not if I call her and tell her to come and join us.”

I brace myself against the wall behind me so I can concentrate on the pleasure she’s giving me without having to worry about staying upright.

“By the time she gets here it could be too late.”

“Oh no,” she says innocently, “she’s waiting downstairs in my car. She can be here in 
seconds
.” She takes my cock in her mouth and I put my hands on the back of her head, pushing her against me, pushing myself into her.

“So fucking call her,” I say, not completely lost in her but coming close to it.

She withdraws again and pulls her kaikki from a pocket on the leg of her pants. She hits a button, connecting with someone while she keeps working my cock, now slippery with her saliva, with her hand.

“Sherry, come on up. We’re just getting started.”

Despite what I’m doing—or allowing her to do to me—some part of me above the waist retains its military training. Porsche is still a suspect, and it’s possible that ‘Sherry’ will turn out to be some goon, brought here to persuade me to take her off the list of suspects. 
Captain
 Burroughs is ready to push Porsche away in a second, 
forcefully
, and to defend himself, even if Gat Burroughs is a little preoccupied.

She replaces her kaikki, takes mine from the sofa where I’d dropped it, holds it up so I can unlock the lobby door, then tosses it back onto the sofa and runs her tongue up and down my cock one more time.

“You feel anything yet soldier boy?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Not 
that
, you goof,” she says, laughing. “There’s HardOn in my lipstick.”

HardOn. Well fuck me. Her girlfriend could be halfway across L.A. and still get here in time for the action. It’s clear that my cock isn’t going to go down for hours.

“You’re joking, right?”

She pulls her face back to look up at me and her expression is pure greed.

“Not a fucking chance.”

Just then Sherry knocks at the door and Porsche rises to let her in. In a moment, all my defenses are down. Her name doesn’t suit her, but that’s because it’s fake. I recognize her instantly from the sims, from advertising campaigns for Shelte and other top-end designers, from celebrity gossip shows. The creamy, dusky skin and long dark hair, courtesy of her Arabic and Italian ancestry. She smiles suddenly, seeing recognition in my eyes. It’s a huge, bright, little-girl-gets-the-candy smile. I’m about to say her name when Porsche shushes me.

“No names,” she admonishes. “Not now and not ever. I’m only wired for Max, you know, not for you.”

Her threat is as cold as the smile of a man on Brace, but it isn’t necessary. Why would I ever bother to repeat Sherry’s real name?

“No names,” I tell her. “I’m trained to keep secrets you know.”

“I know, soldier boy. I know all about you.”

Just as she did in the garden she caresses the Tijuana decal briefly, but this time it has little effect on me. I am far, far from Tijuana now. The HardOn is doing its work, and beneath it I can sense that she’s laced it with something subtler too, something she hasn’t mentioned: just a touch of Sunday Best. It’s not enough to make me hallucinate, but it tints the entire scene with a radiant glow and time seems to slow slightly, making every delicious moment last longer.

“Okaaaaay,” Sherry says, moving toward us and unbuttoning her shirt at the same time. “Party time is 
here
.”

The drugs are doing their job and I am awash in a tide of hormones, filled with nothing but sex and more sex. Sherry floats toward me as though moving through water, shedding her clothes along the way. Her body is slim and dark and perfect and I want to eat every inch of it. Her voice—that famous, triple platinum, multi-award-winning, siren of the airwaves voice—is saying: 
Porsche, it’s just like you promised!

The only problem with Sunday Best is that although it gives you its luminescent visions, it has an effect similar to Erase. Not as efficient, mind you—you always remember something, but you never remember everything. Even as events are taking place you are forgetting them, so the sex appears to me as a series of snapshots.

Moment one: Sherry prostrate on her belly with me on top of her, sliding myself, slippery, into her, while her face is buried between Porsche’s legs. Porsche grinds her hips slowly at first, then lets out a whoop like a cowgirl and starts thrusting them wildly, Sherry’s head bobbing in her lap.

Moment two: Sherry is on all fours, riding Porsche’s hand. Porsche is stroking her between the legs in such a controlled, masterful way that I can’t help but admire it—this is 
skill
. She brings Sherry close to cumming, then eases her back from the brink, then drags her back to the edge of that cliff, and then finally throws her off, Sherry howling the whole way, making animal sounds, her long hair flying furiously and her entire body shuddering with such force that her teeth chatter involuntarily.

Moment three: Porsche on her knees again. I am cumming—finally, at long last—and she is milking it out of me with her hand. In that pose, in an ecstasy close to rapture, she seems to be praying, and I baptize her as she begs for more, laughing her head off, covered in it.

Eventually the HardOn and Sunday Best in my system wind down, as do whatever drugs the girls are on. Sherry is the first to go. She seems a little tense now, as though coming down has made her realize what she’s done—not the sex, but the risk to her reputation, to her future. Today’s star can so easily become fodder for tomorrow’s tabloid simcast. Porsche lingers, watching her go.

“She’s worried,” I say.

Porsche just shrugs.

“She’ll get over it,” she says, doing up her pants. “In a day or two when she sees that you haven’t sold your story to the media she’ll be fine.”

Although her reasoning makes sense, there’s nothing in her tone to indicate that it matters to her in the smallest way.

“I’m still on the list of suspects aren’t I?” she asks rhetorically, then pulls her shirt over her head and tugs it into place.

“Yeah, you’re still on the list.”

“And if I did it and you catch me, I still get arrested, don’t I?”

“Yup.”

“See,” she says with a combination of sweetness and evil that’s hard to read. “I told you. It didn’t change a thing.”

I have nothing to say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and watch her leave. I go to bed, hoping I can sleep at least two or three hours before getting back to work. When I dream—despite the evening I’ve had, or perhaps because of it—they are not good dreams. I am back in Tijuana, glimpsing small scenes of what went on there. In my dreams, though, Porsche is there, laughing, flirting with the soldiers, riding them and going down on them between atrocities, during atrocities. I wake up earlier than I’d intended to, cold with sweat.

Somewhere in my unconscious, below the level of the orgy and the drugs, my mind has been at work. I wake with the conviction that, no matter how good she tastes, Porsche is evil. She is not just the bitchy, catty kind of woman I usually fall for, she is genuinely, thoroughly sociopathic. My dreams are an unconscious representation of that fact, but the fact itself rests on more than a few nightmares. I think about her casual disregard for Sherry, who was just a prop for her in an evening of sex. I know that she has just as little regard for me, and that I was nothing more. If seducing me was intended—despite her words—to subtly co-opt me, it has done just the opposite. I never doubted that she was capable of having her grandfather killed, but now it seems more likely than ever that she has at least tried to find some way to circumvent her wiring. For someone like her it would be just too tempting not to.

As usual I meditate for an hour, but I’m off my game. People think meditation is easy—it looks like it in the sims—but the truth is that real meditation is demanding and today it’s a challenge.

HardOn and Sunday Best have built in controllers to prevent morning-after side effects, but Porsche does not. Unless you're a monk there’s nothing chaste about a dharma practice, but there is something specific about sex with Porsche that is the antithesis of a contemplative practice. I started meditating after Tijuana—because of Tijuana—and I had the same feeling then.

My thoughts are scattered and chatter at me like monkeys scolding me from the trees.  My emotions pull in conflicting directions and make it difficult to get centered.  Maybe the truth is that I’m ashamed of myself and the last place I really want to be is inside my own head.  I try to face that shame, to abide with it, but it’s an active, taunting thing that seems beyond my reach.  And to be honest I suspect that the 
pleasure
 of fucking Porsche is still too fresh for me to get a handle on the shame that comes along with it.  And from somewhere in that morass of feelings and impressions comes a very real sense of threat.  Porsche, I now think, has no center—at her core there is nothing at all—and people like that are always dangerous.