“What are you talking about?”
“Propositioned in the parking lot seconds after getting here,” said Serge. “Barracuda hooker. For more on that, please visit my site. I have to leave something off the table.”
“In our own parking lot?” said an independent polygraph examiner for defense attorneys who passed everyone. “That’s hard to believe.”
“Not just the parking lot,” said Serge. “She’s right here in the bar.”
Heads spun. “Where?”
“Over there,” said Serge. “The brunette number talking to that guy in the polo shirt. Pegged her immediately as the local honey trap.”
“That’s not a hooker.”
“To the untrained eye,” said Serge. “The business suit throws most people off, but that’s now the uniform for extended-stay properties. Click the special hyper-link on my site.”
“No, I mean we know her. That’s our district manager …”
“… She’s coming over here. She looks pissed.”
“You didn’t happened to say anything to her in the parking lot that made her angry?”
“Absolutely not. Well, maybe I mumbled the V-word.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
The woman arrived at the table and stared daggers at Serge.
Serge smiled back. “By vagina, I meant how well you carry it.”
The woman grabbed one of the drinks from the table and dumped it on Serge’s head, then stormed away.
Serge wiped his face with a napkin. “Vagina has become such a tricky word.” He clicked open a wet pen. “Overall, how would you rate your stay?…”
Three TVs were on above the bar; four more hung from wall brackets mounted in the corners.
“… Police believe those responsible for the current string of Florida motel robberies are the same gang that worked the I-75 corridor from Cincinnati to Chattanooga last year … And now the Internet story that everyone’s talking about…”
One of the businessmen pointed up at the evening newscast. “Look, it’s on again.”
The tables became quiet. Someone asked the bartender to crank the volume.
“What’s going on?” asked Serge.
“Shhhhh. You’ll miss it.”
“… Investigators were initially baffled by the bodies of two young men, who appeared to have been killed by giant constrictor snakes. While reports of large exotic pets being released into the wild are well documented, no confirmed fatalities have ever been reported. Complicating matters were severe facial injuries that couldn’t be explained by any known pets. Official spokesmen said the case was going nowhere until a break came, of all places, from a video anonymously posted on YouTube. The popular Internet site reported record-breaking hits until the video was taken down at the request of authorities, but not before our station was able to obtain a copy. The footage is too offensive to air, but it begins with a pair of so-called skinheads attacking a homeless man beneath an underpass near Jacksonville’s picturesque St. Johns River. The video then jumps to a predawn scene where the tables have been turned and the skinheads are under attack. Meanwhile, law enforcement has requested that anyone with information please contact them, but so far all the department’s anonymous tip lines have been swamped by callers registering support for the perpetrators …”
The TV image switched to a police captain at a podium. “Two people are dead, and there’s at least one very disturbed person out there. So if you don’t have any pertinent information, please stop calling us and laughing.”
The anchorwoman returned. “While this station continues to stand by its policy of not airing the graphic footage, our own science editor Mary Nelson is here to explain the physics of how the young men died. Mary? …”
“Jennifer, I’m standing in the outdoors section of a local Home Depot. To the stable individual, everything here appears innocent and cheerful. But to a heart filled with malice, evil lurks beneath the begonias. I’m now holding up an unassuming garden hose. This is the type with small pinholes that collapses flat and was used extensively to irrigate lawns in the nostalgic days of old Florida before built-in underground systems became the rage. It was a pair of hoses just like the one in my hand that police have identified as the murder weapon and is now on sale for a limited time … Back to you …”
“Thanks Mary … Later in this broadcast: It was supposed to be a fun outing, but in the end a bear lay dead and a father was thankful for his son’s remote-control helicopter …”
The kamikaze opened a laptop on the table. “Check it out. I captured the video before they took it down.”
The table gang got up and crowded around the notebook’s screen, showing grainy, low-light footage of two people wrapped ankle-to-shoulder in green hoses. They slowly crossed a lawn like inchworms.
“… Now the Action Five business report. Brad?”
“Jennifer, all area home improvement stores are reporting a huge run on garden hoses …”
The loan consolidator: “Newspaper said they were in a race to get to the shut-off valve before the automatic sprinkler system came on and filled the hoses.”
“So what?” said the fertilizer salesman. “How can water in those hoses hurt them?”
