RetroXotique

I was never exactly a trusting soul, but I used to trust some people sometimes.  These days those sometimes didn’t happen too often.  But Irma had something going for her that made me want to trust her, or at least not care too much whether she was trustworthy or not.  I just wanted to be with her; to have that old dream in the flesh again that had kept me going over the past five years.

But I wasn’t kidding myself either; if Irma turned up tonight, it would not be down entirely to my irresistible charm.  It would be because there was something in it for Irma.  Maybe it would be because she wanted to hurt Johnny back a little for the way he’d been treating her, or maybe she had some other reason.

No doubt Johnny gave her a comfortable enough life in between his bouts of sullen possessiveness: comfortable enough so that she would never choose a guy like me over him –  not the way things had worked out for me now in any case.  But Hell, I had waited for so long that I would take her any way I could get her, and for however long, and not let too much clever second-guessing get in the way.

I must have looked like someone who hadn’t had too much recent luck with women, because almost as soon as I’d checked in, the Madison desk clerk had intimated that he could get me some real nice and willing female company if I slipped him a few notes with the right president’s face on them.  He knew this girl, he said, who could be a movie star someday; real pretty, nice figure and didn’t keep it all to herself; was just waiting around this town for her big break to arrive.

Yeah, in this town we all knew girls like that, and how they ended up.  Only the lady I was holding out for had too much class and savvy to ever wind up that way.  So I passed on his kind offer, and now I was waiting in my room with a bottle of five-year-old hooch I’d been saving and two glasses set out on the table, and hoping that my celibate patience was about to pay off big time.

Irma did not disappoint.  Even before her first sharp but delicate tap on the door had been followed by a second and third, I had the door wide open.

“You were quite right, darling – this place bears absolutely no resemblance to the Ritz.  And my God, the way that desk clerk looked at me made my skin crawl!”

“It’s called lust, Angel,” I grinned, “ and looking like you do, you’d better get used to it.  Welcome to my humble abode”

Tonight she’d ditched the show gown for something black and more practical but just as tight.  Someone who was more familiar with women’s fashions than me might know  it was the latest style of Dior suit or some such, but even I could tell it was a damned expensive outfit, and way too classy for this part of town.

The fishnets were now silk and seamed stockings, and the impossibly tapered skirt was just short enough to make sure her hosiery and the shapely calves they sheathed were  properly admired.  The real mystery of it was how she’d managed the motel stairs in that skirt.

Her platinum blonde hairdo was topped by a real cute black hat with a long feather tilted at a darling angle and a tiny veil in front that smoked out the teasing invitation glistening in her eyes.  She gave me a moist and vermilion peck on the cheek and stepped past me on heels that would have left puncture holes in her wake in the carpeting if there had been any carpeting.

I hauled my jaw back up into place, closed the door and followed the lazy swish of her hips into the room.  She reached up and began to unskewer that chic little hat from her chicly piled hairdo as she surveyed the table and the pair of glasses and liquor bottle arranged on top of it:

“Drinking for two these days, Michael?  Or were you so confident I would come?  But no romantic candles!  I do hope you’re not taking me for granted so soon.”  There was a nice lilt of humour in her voice which I couldn’t see enough of her face to be absolutely sure of.

“More hope than confidence, Angel,” I said.  “And I couldn’t risk the expense of candles without being really sure.  But now that you’re here we can down a couple of glasses and head for somewhere that fits that sexy outfit you got on a lot better.”

“You mean this old thing?”  She passed her darkly gloved palms over curve-gripping elegance of her outfit. “Sweet of you to notice, Michael, but it’s just something I threw on in haste and regretted as soon as I reached those stairs.  Doesn’t this place have an elevator?”

“Not hardly. Lucky to have running water and a ’phone in each corridor.  But don’t worry; I ain’t too awful fond of it myself.  In fact, let’s skip the drinks and get out of here right now.”

“Michael darling, do I really seem like such a selfish bitch to you?  At least let’s get our priorities right.”  She fished her hat very carefully free of her hair, then laid the hat and the long pearl-headed hatpins which had led it in place, together with her long black leather purse, on the table beside the booze.  She turned to look at me as she fluffed out the densely shimmering bounce of her platinum hair.  “You’ve waited five long years to get me alone to yourself again; I wouldn’t dream of making you wait a moment longer.  I’m not that cruel – and besides, you’re not the only one who’s been looking forward to this moment, you now.  I presume that bed over there is perfectly serviceable?  It will take the weight of two without collapsing, wont it?”

Irma had absolutely no doubts that she had me securely hooked, and with very good reason, but even she must have been taken a little aback by the speed with which I took her up on her offer.

In two long swift strides I was pressed up against her and had gathered all that scented and stylishly sheathed womanliness into my arms. In another three strides I had scooped the slightly startled heft of her ample curves up, my hands roaming feverishly over every available tight and tactile inch of her as I eased her down onto the bed and followed down atop her, my mouth hungrily fitting the parted lushness of her lips.

“My God, but you are an eager boy, aren’t you?” she gasped as she came up briefly for air.  “But would you mind terribly allowing me to remove my outfit first before you do untold damage to it?  It is the only one I brought with me, you know – and God only knows what I’ll look like going back to my apartment if you continue at your present frantic rate.”

I groaned a bit as I removed my knee from between her softly squirming thighs and allowed her to ease the pressure on her hiked skirt a little.

“So that outfit ain’t just any old thing after all, Angel?”  I hoped my crooked grin was a convincing cover for the grimace lurking behind it.

As she checked herself over thoroughly for rips, tears and popped buttons, she gave me a look that was somewhere between amusement and despair. “Honestly, Michael!  You’re even more hopeless than I remembered…”  And she fingered the slightly dishevelled platinum extravagance of her hair in a manner which I would later recall as telling.

“If you weren’t so damned gorgeous, Angel, and if I hadn’t been locked away from you for so long, I might feel the need to apologise.  But as it is…”  I shrugged and let the rest of my sentence hang in the air’s heavy carnal tension as, a little too unhurriedly for my liking, she began undoing buttons and unzipping zips.

My frustration wasn’t eased any when she finally slipped out of her jacket and began to ease herself out of that curve-adherent skirt.  Underneath that again she had on some kind of lace trimmed black garment that was all squeeze, push and lift and featured enough intricate boning and lacing so that I had an awful feeling it might take her another hour to get herself loose from it.

“Damnit Angel,” I growled.  “How’d you get all of you into that thing?”

She gave me a cool look from under her eyelashes:  “You don’t like it?  I wore it especially for you; it’s my sexiest corselette.   And what do you mean, all of me?  Damn you, Michael, I will not be called fat!  A lady with my curves needs a little support in today’s fashions, you know – it’s the –”

“I know, I know, babe: it’s the Look.  And you look hotter than hell in that thing, but if you can’t pull a Houdini act in say the next ten seconds I don’t think my heart and other bodily parts will be able to take it.”

Slightly mollified, she finished stepping out of her skirt, the bottom rim of her elastic armour plating biting into her thighs in the fleshy gap to her gartered stocking tops as she did so.  As she bent I was presented with an increasingly arousing view of  ample black satin-sausaged bottom.  I groaned again, and a trickle of sweat ran down the small of my back.

“Well if you’re in such a hurry to have your wicked way with me, you can help you know,”  she laughed sultrily.  “I doubt that even your clumsy male hands could do much damage to this underwear.”

Oh I helped all right.  The lacing and zippers and snappy hook and eye sequences on that figure-trimming and bosom-boosting contraption never stood a chance.  In between tasting every freshly exposed delicious inch of her I had her full womanly half protesting and half thrilled curves sloughed out of that corselette thing and into the bed in rough and frantic treble quick time.

She was plumper and softer and even more woman than I remembered, and she  squealed breathily as I ripped the last wisp of  dainty black lace free of the pulsing daintily trimmed mound of her womanhood.  I knocked against it with growing and increasing insistence and was at length moistly and warmly admitted.

“Oh  Michael!  Michael!  Welcome back!” she cried, and I felt her fingernails dig into my arched back as I throbbed and grew and exploded inside her.

Some time later I lay there very still and very much alive with my heart pounding with a sort of steady insistent joy in my chest.  Irma’s long warm softness was curled against my side and she had one lissom dancer’s thigh twined across me, and the bed’s single cover had slipped down from her lovely plump shoulders just enough so that the sidewards loll of her ample unsupported cleavage undulated softly with her every sleepy breath, revealing a pink saucer of engorged nipple on every third inhalation.  I watched her, counting dreamily:  one… two… three; one… two… three…

“Michael darling,” she murmured as her sassily shellacked fingernails tripped playfully through the hairs on my chest.  “You really have been faithful to me, haven’t you?  That first time proved that fairly conclusively.  I’m ever so pleased.”

I looked down at that beautiful platinum-framed face snuggled in the hollow of my naked shoulder and found it smiling teasingly back at me, its densely lashed eyes full of heavy lidded and sly languor.  I grimaced uncomfortably, obligingly adding to her amusement:

“Yeah, that first time was over pretty damned quick at that.  Didn’t really do you justice there, did I, Angel?  And as for being faithful, well where I been these past years, that wasn’t all that much of a problem.”

She stretched to reach my neck and pressed her pouting lips into it, leaving behind yet another lipstick stigmata:  “Oh you poor, poor thing!  But don’t feel so bad about it; those times after the first one were wonderful – and the first one was really rather sweet also, in its own way.”

“Glad to be of service, Ma’am,” I muttered.  “Now could you please shut your lovely mouth about it?  A guy’s entitled to one dodgy firecracker after five years away from the flame, ain’t he?”

“Hmmm…  You wouldn’t happen to have another lovely firecracker to spare there for a lady, would you, before she has to take her leave?  Johnny will be certain to be missing me by now, I feel – and sufficiently repentant.”

The thought of her going back to Johnny now appealed to none of my better instincts.  Of course I was still crazy for Irma; it’s just that at that moment I didn’t like her too much:  “Sorry, Angel.  Old Faithful here seems to be all firecrackered out just now for some reason. Maybe old Johnny can oblige you some instead when you get back to him.”

I felt her stiffen beside me at that.  Well, stiffen as much as a lushly curved naked lady can anyhow:  “Damn you, Michael!  Why do you have to spoil everything?  Everything about tonight was wonderful.  You were wonderful: not even a hint of nastiness about you despite…  Anyway, what did you expect me to do: leave Johnny for you?  You know I can’t do that.  Michael, if…”

“Don’t worry your beautiful blonde head about it, babe.  I know how things stand now.  Some things five years takes away from you that you can never catch up on again.  Don’t you think I know that? It’s just I thought it bad form to drag his dirty little name into this dingy little room tonight.  Why did you have to do that, do you think?  Don’t answer that – I think I can guess why.  Well it’s been nice, Angel – real nice.  But right now I think I need to be on my own for a while – I’m not good company anymore.”

She didn’t say anything; what could she say?  But from the look on her face I think she’d have preferred that I’d just slapped her like I’m sure Johnny would have done; just like she’d learned how to handle over the past five years.  I almost felt like I would have preferred to do it too; somehow this way, just with words, hurt her way more than I had meant to.  So much for the strong, silent type, huh?

She moved slowly away from me and sat up on the bed, bringing the cover with her.  Her eyes never looked up at me once, and for a moment I thought she might be crying, but Irma never cried that I had ever seen:

“I’m just going to put myself back together; then I’ll leave you alone,” she stated very quietly, very matter of fact.  “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t watch.”

“Sure.  There’s a closet with a washbasin and toilet over there if you want to use it, or I can…”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.  You stay here.  After all it is your room.”

She slipped her feet into her high heeled pumps and stood up, the tilt of those heels flexing the backs of her creamy thighs and raising her buttocks a couple of pneumatically jouncing notches also.  The view as she bent to sweep her things up into her arms made me regret my badly timed and crazy principled stance more than a little.

Still, watching her walk over to that closet door, the succulently pendulous volume of her tumescent breasts gathered with her clothes into her crossed arms, I reckoned it was maybe for the best.  I could understand perfectly just why Johnny had made his move on her once I was out of the picture, and even better why he would never share her or let her go – at least not easily.  But he had a damned poor way of appreciating her, which almost made it feel like it would be as much rescue as theft to reclaim her now.  Would she welcome rescue, though, from the luxury that came with the abuse?  I think Irma had weighed up and made her choices there a long time ago.

Some prisoners hate a locked door; others feel safe behind one.  In my few weeks of freedom I had found myself locking doors out of some inbred reflex.  So that, just for a few dead moments while I shrugged back into my clothes and listened to the sad, muffled and lonely sounds of lost intimacy which Irma’s dressing behind the closet door formed, I forgot my freedom and was back in those clammy cells.  It was an illusion made all the more effective by the sound of the key turning in the motel room’s lock.  It took me a few seconds to snap out of it enough to realize that this time it would be no uniformed warder walking through the door.

“Real cosy penthouse pad you got here, Mike,” Johnny Diamond sneered.  “Great for entertaining the dames, I bet.”

“Yeah, Johnny,” I said.  “Anyone’s welcome – some even have their own keys.”

Johnny pressed the door shut behind him with a leather gloved hand.  He was dressed for the night, a long black coat over his tuxedo, a fancy silk scarf draped inside the coat lapels, and a wide-brimmed fedora pulled over his pomaded pompadour.  Johnny looked like a lizard with a very generous clothing budget.

“In this town,” he said, “I own all the keys, or can buy the ones I want.  Your desk clerk came real cheap.  He was kinda disappointed in you, Mike.  You know, you really should have bought that floozie off him – instead of bringing your own.”

“That right?” Irma was being awful quiet behind that closet door.

“Yeah, that’s right.”  He flipped open his overcoat buttons and loosened the scarf.  “Hot in here, ain’t it?  Steamy even, you might say.”

“Can’t say as I noticed.”

“Sure you did, Mike.”  He gave me that sour smile of his and raised his voice suddenly: “You can stop holding your breath in there and join us now… Angel.  I know you’re here; you left your purse out here on the table, and your perfume is stinking up the place.”

“I think you should know that it’s all over between us now, Johnny.  All I want is my share of the loot, and then you’re both rid of me forever.”

Everything about him found that amusing – everything except the eyes:  “Oh it ain’t over, Mike.  Not nearly.  What’s that saying they got: it ain’t over until the fat lady sings?  Well, come out here right now, Irma babe.  Come out and sing for us a while.”

Slowly the closet door and Irma rejoined us.  She hadn’t quite straightened herself out yet.  She was still smoothing and tugging at that dark pencil skirt with so much hip and derriere curve filling it that you could just make out the mid-thigh imprint of her garter tabs through its soft, clingy fabric.  She’s missed the top button of her tight little jacket, so that an abundance of pronouncedly elevated cleavage was showing, and some of her sexy lace trimmed foundation garment along with it.  The peek-a-boo styling of her shoulder-draping platinum hair was perfectly fluffed and symmetrical once more and her lipstick quotient had been topped up to the requisite smoochy Hollywood blonde levels.

Johnny’s dark button eyes gleamed with a sort of bitter lust as he leered over at her:  “Lights up a room when she comes in, don’t she, Mike?  Let’s see if we can’t get her to throw some light on a few things for you before you’re gone.  Wouldn’t like old Mike to leave us thinking the wrong things about you, would we, babe?”

He was looking at her so oddly, so intensely, that for a moment I thought he might have forgotten I was still there. I stood up and began to inch towards him, but barely got a half step before his hand dove in under his scarf and overcoat lapels and came out with a .45 automatic.  That one fluid movement had swung it around to point directly at my chest:

“Uh-huh, Mike.  Don’t take another step or I’ll have to drill you.  And stick your hands in your pockets and keep them there.  Now that’s what I call smart.  I ain’t Joey, you know; I ain’t about to give you even a whisper of a chance.”

I did as I was told and stayed real still.  Even without that damned table with the drink and Irma’s purse on it blocking the way, I’d never have got to him before his bullet got to me.  But I knew I’d have to move soon.  I knew Johnny’s style of old.  Johnny was building himself up to something: something real nasty.  Maybe I could get a little edge from somewhere; put him off his stride before he got set.

“This is a whole new you I’m seeing, Johnny,” I said, trying to keep my voice sounding calm.  “You never used to do your own shooting before; never liked to get any dirt on your hands that wouldn’t wash off real quick.  Is that strictly wise though?  Particularly as I was just about to leave anyway.  If it’s the money…”

“Everything’s about the money, Mike.  Irma will tell you that – won’t you, doll?  And you’re right: I never did have to do my own shooting, not even that night in the alley five years ago…”

“Johnny, please…” Irma’s voice was a desperate murmur.  Her knuckles whitened as her long nailed fingers twined and fidgeted about each other.  She stepped over beside Johnny and fixed him with those big baby blues.

“…and if things work out,” he continued, “I won’t have to do any of my own shooting tonight either.”

“No, Johnny, don’t,” she pleaded with a terrible softness in her voice.  “You don’t have to…”

I felt suddenly as cold as if someone had shot me dead in that alley all those years ago:  “No, Johnny, you go right on ahead.  Tell me all about that night.  Some cop got lucky with a shot from a throw down once his own gun was empty – what did that have to do with you?”

Johnny gave a short ugly laugh:  “That what you really believe, Mike?  That little hole in the back of your leg is due to some cop having to use a tiny peashooter of a gun and not hitting you entirely right?  Hey, I can see how it would make you feel better believing it that way, instead of what really happened. Do you want to tell him, sugar, or will I?”

Irma took another few pecking steps nearer to him, trying a sultry smile, putting a little extra action into those big slinky hips:  “Oh Johnny… darling… don’t do this…”  She placed a pale hand on his immaculate shirt front and caressed him fondly.

But her smile turned to a grimace and those long lazy lashes sprang wide open into a look of startled pain as he grabbed at her wrist and twisted savagely:

“Well ain’t that sweet?” he sneered.  “Darling now, is it?  Makes a bit of a change from all this Michael this and Michael that I been having to listen to all these years.  Funny you missing loverboy that much, sugar – being it was you made sure he went in the clink in the first place.”

Squirming about under the constantly increased pressure of his left-handed grip, Irma let out a sound that was part sob, part rage: “No!”

“Oh yes, Mike.  All I needed to tell Angel here was that she could have all of me  – and all of my money – if you weren’t in the picture no more, and she jumped at the chance.  Greedy, spoilt little girl, is your Irma – well, maybe not so little anymore, but spoilt definitely.  So all I had to do was lead you down that alley and she was waiting there in a doorway with her little pop gun all loaded and ready.  Those cops might never have caught you otherwise, Mike; you was some runner with two good legs.  And me they didn’t even want to catch…”

She twisted her startled blonde head towards me, her big blue sexy eyes full of pleading:  “It wasn’t like that, Michael!  He wanted me to kill you, but I…”

“You couldn’t even do that little thing right, could you, sugar?  So you shot loverboy’s leg to pieces and left him to rot behind bars for five years instead.  Real nice.  Why don’t you thank the nice lady, Mike?  You not saying anything at all makes you seem so ungrateful, don’t it… Angel?”

“You… you bastard!” she sobbed, and I risked another couple of steps forward as he lost himself for a moment in enjoying how her curves squirmed around inside that tight outfit and her big breasts made a heaving and bobbing bid for freedom from their push-up black satin and lace moorings as she writhed under his twisting pressure.  Yeah, Johnny was enjoying his work tonight: enjoying it way too much for my liking.

“Awww!” he crooned in a sinister parody of sympathy, twisting here wrist just a little more so that she was forced to bend at the knees, her stylish but difficult high heels wobbling and sliding beneath her, her lovely big compacted ass pushing and straining at the taut fabric and seams of that figure-gripping skirt which was already near to its popping point.  “Didn’t want darling Michael to know any of that, did you, babe?  See, your Angel likes to hold onto her place in a man’s dreams, Mike, no matter what she might’ve done to them in the meantime.  And just one man ain’t enough adoration for her – is it, sugar?  Oh no: there’s been plenty of men hanging around her honey pot over the years, and she likes it that way, no matter what I do to try to discourage her, and I’ve done plenty, believe me.  But you she had a special soft spot for, Mike – heh-heh! actually she’s got several real soft spots now, as you probably noticed when she pried herself out of her corsets for you tonight.  What do you think of our big plump femme fatale these days, Mike – more of her to love, or just too much?  I ain’t too sure about it myself: hate the way she’s let everything slide.  But that soft spot she’s got for you – I always did find that real annoying;  and I’m really gonna have to do something about that right now.”

Although his aim was being pulled slightly off-centre by Irma’s struggles, Johnny was compensating for that nicely.  If that big .45 of his went off now, wherever it hit it would make a big nasty lethal hole in my chest.  But I had to get closer to him, even if getting closer just gave him a bigger target to plug.  I inched forward another couple of steps, measuring the distance, and the height of that silly inconvenient little table between us.  I’d have to move soon or it would be too late.

“You always did like taking chances, didn’t you, Mike?  Always liked a gamble. Always liked the throw of a dice or the toss of a coin. That’s why I’m where I am now and you’re in this jam.  But don’t gamble one more step, Mike, and keep those hands nicely tucked away in those pockets.  Otherwise I may have to change the habits of a lifetime and shoot you myself — and you know how I’d hate to spoil the nice neat little plan I had in mind by doing that.”

I came to a halt and kept my hands right where they were.  Johnny had a good eye for these details; he’d known at first glance that I had nothing in my pockets – nothing as big as a gun anyway.

“Oh yeah?  What nice neat little plan is that, Johnny?  I always did like to be in on whatever sneaky underhand scheme you had cooked up – even the ones you were just too chicken-shit scared to tell me about.”  Maybe if I got him riled enough it might shake his aim off enough to…

“That was a cheap shot, Mike – real cheap.  But I’ll be glad to tell you about my plan anyway; I’m a real forgiving guy.  What happens now is…”  He levered Irma forward toward the table, twisting her wrist so that she had no choice but to jacknife downwards from the waist despite the danger this position and her thrustingly squirming backside presented to her sexy but completely impractically tight skirt.  “…Irma fetches her favourite toy popgun from her purse and she does what she should have done five years ago.  Just do it, dollface, or you won’t like what happens to your pretty little wrist next.  That’s better…”

Irma’s trembling hand came up out of the long black purse with a silver plated and pearl handled little .22.  There might have been a tear in her startlingly blue eyes as she looked across at me, but I couldn’t be too sure.  She might have been real sorry to have to kill me, but it could also have been that Johnny’s grip on her wrist was really hurting her.

Johnny swung her back upright and in real close to him:  “I know what you’re thinking, Mike.  You’re thinking if you move fast enough she might miss a little, and that little thing won’t bust you up too much anyway.  But she’s a real Miss Annie Oakley with that pistol, and I don’t expect her to miss.  But just in case she does, my big cannon certainly won’t; I’ll make certain of that.”  He pulled her in even closer, squeezing those big lovely curves in against him, making sure her gun was aimed directly at the broadest part of me, high up.  Instinctively, I turned very slightly side on to her aim.  I could see by the dull glaze in her gorgeous eyes and the trembling curl of her lush red lips that she was beginning to steel herself for what she had to do.  Me dead or her broken: it was an easy choice.

“You see it was all real tragic,” Johnny explained, a quiet and deadly excitement in his voice, “You got out of jail, came looking for her, tried hooking up with her again, but she was having none of it; said it was too late, that it was all over.  But you couldn’t accept that: she was the dream that had kept you going all those miserable years in the clink, and you kept after her, pestering her.  So she agreed to meet you one last time for old time’s sake, hoping to reason with you; hoping to end it like two civilised people.  Only she hadn’t counted on how uncivilized prison can make a guy.  You got nasty with her: nasty and real rough.  There was only one way to save herself, wasn’t there sugar?  She just had to kill you…  Self defence, plain and simple – I’m sure the cops will see it that way, especially when the desk clerk tells the story I paid him to tell about how you were acting.  Now shoot, sugar…”

A full roll of dollar coins in the face can do a hell of a lot of damage, whether wrapped up tight in a good solid right hook, or thrown hard and fast across a short distance.  I brought that roll swiftly out from the pocket my angled stance had blindsided them both to, and was already launching myself sideways towards them as I hurled that long tight cylinder across the narrowing span of hissing air between us.

The tube of coins connected sharply dead centre between Johnny’s still-smiling black button eyes, and I saw him stagger back dazed as my leap landed me sprawling right up against that table, and two shots rang out, one a deafening boom, one like a small dog barking, both ear-splitting in that tiny room.

I came up off the floor with the table legs in my fists and swung it wide and sharp against the side of Johnny’s fedoraed head.  He careened sideways, bringing Irma toppling with him, and both of their guns spun free across the floor as they fell.  Johnny’s eyes were still slightly glazed from the impact of those coins, and already a big red circular gouge was forming like a bloodshot third eye between his furrowed eyebrows, but he was coming to pretty quick, pushing and fumbling his way desperately across Irma to get to his gun.

Irma was a difficult dame to get over – literally. There was an awful lot of full-curved and writhing voluptuousness to surmount, and all of it bucking and kicking and hissing in a tantrum.  If Johnny was desperate, then Irma was downright peeved about something or other, most likely about the way the back slit of her expensive pencil skirt had ripped right up to bum-sausaging girdle level in that fall.  And Johnny roughly pawing and pushing his way over her, popping more of her elegant buttons and seams on his hefty way, didn’t improve her disposition one little bit.

She kicked and squirmed and turned under Johnny as he stretched over her for that gun, and was no help at all to him.  She seemed to have other priorities than his as she flounced like a big sleek sexy seal under him, all kicking stilettos and writhing thighs and smoky stocking tops and ample pumping and wiggling black satin girdled bottom.  Then I saw exactly what had her so worked up, and it wasn’t retrieving that cute but deadly little pearl handled pistol of hers.

After all, I guess getting a firearm back really doesn’t amount to a hill of beans when a sexy glamour girl has just lost her wig.

All that new long sleek and perfect platinum blondeness which I’d first noticed when getting reacquainted with Irma was store bought – and from a very expensive store by the look of it and the urgency with which she was scrambling after it.  Someone seemed to have rather savagely shorn her own natural and slightly less luminous hair into a sort of cruel parody of an urchin cut whose closeness to the scalp spikily revealed its dark chestnut roots.  Someone who hadn’t liked the looks his voluptuous songstress was drawing from the male clientele, or the looks she was maybe giving them in return.

I stepped towards the mixed tangle of awkwardly struggling tuxedoed and silk stockinged limbs, and felt the first shooting twinge in my leg.  That last leap of mine had put a little too much unaccustomed athletic pressure on that old injury.  I almost had to drag its steadily numbing heaviness behind me. Worse still, I didn’t make it over to Johnny before he made it to his gun.

He rolled around towards me, using Irma’s big succulent elasticated ass to push himself into an aiming position.  He almost got there too, but I was standing over him by then, and stooped, and clamped a hand down firmly over his and the .45’s firing pin. The barrel was digging right into my gut as I curled my grip around so that I could just reach the trigger, and jammed a finger into the trigger guard behind it and Johnny’s trigger finger.  I felt the sharp pinch as Johnny pulled hard as he could and with desperate strength but couldn’t get the trigger back far enough to fire his shot.

I took a fistful of Johnny’s shiny lapels and hauled him upright and shook him like a rat and began twisting the gun and his gun hand acutely against his grip.  Johnny grunted with the pain of it as his trigger finger achieved an impossible excruciating angle and I could feel his grip loosening on the gun.  Right about then was when my leg gave way altogether.

Suddenly I couldn’t feel it at all and it wouldn’t take my weight and I was balancing precariously on one leg and Johnny knew it and he started throwing his weight from side to side in my grip.  His eyes had a black button frantic intensity as he looked over my shoulder at something moving behind me:

“Now, Irma!” he all but screamed.  “Shoot him now, goddammit!”

I shifted my grip higher up on his lapels, high enough to tourniquet him into a strangled silence, and twisted my head around to see what Johnny had been looking at so hopefully.

It was Irma all right,  gorgeous, full-bodied, seductive Irma: gorgeous despite her de-wigged,  brutally cropped hair and her ripped seams and her popped buttons; gorgeous despite the flesh-subduing and figure-moulding black satin corsetry no longer quite containing her ample, tremulously heaving breasts or the swell of her pinched hips; gorgeous despite the drift of her sheer silk stockings as they escaped the upward pull of her garter tabs and slipped down those long plump showgirl thighs and creased about her dimplingly braced knees; gorgeous despite the terrible, unreadable expression on her flushed, heavily made up face; gorgeous despite the tiny silver-plated gun she held stiffly in both extended hands and pointed directly at my head.

I turned away from her – you don’t want to watch a dream as it kills you – and butted Johnny full-force in the nose as a parting gesture to remember me by.  The impact of my forehead threw him back a couple of staggering steps and I lost my tenuous one-footed purchase on the floor and the shot yapped like a cranky lapdog behind me as I dropped to my knees, squeezing my eyes shut and flinching in expectation, still gripping tightly to Johnny’s lapels and Johnny’s gun.

Being suddenly dead must have been as much of a shock to Johnny Diamond as still being alive was to me.  After a moment of deafening aftershock and silence, I allowed myself to breathe again, and to open my eyes.

I looked up at Johnny.  Irma’s tiny bullet had caught him perfectly dead centre in the round, red, dollar-sized target my toss of the coins had made for her between his shocked, dead eyes.

Johnny stumbled and staggered and swayed over me and I held onto him and braced my arms and eased him to one side and let him do a slow motion jack knife onto the floor beside me.

Still the sensation hadn’t returned to my leg.  Still I couldn’t stand up.  I edged around on my knees until I was facing her.  There was a strange frightened and frightening light in her big blue eyes and her soft cheeks shuddered with a tension that was just this very dangerous side of total breakdown.  I couldn’t tell if she could really see me any more, but the barrel of that little gun of hers was wavering and dropping with her shiveringly tensed arms, and now had my head in its sights again.

“If you kill me now, Angel,” I croaked through my very crooked smile, “who’s gonna explain all this to the cops for you?  You wouldn’t like prison.  Believe me – I’ve been there.  And when you finally got out – oh, say in about ten years time if the judge has a thing for big gorgeous blondes – there won’t be anybody or anything waiting for you – not even a dream.”

My mouth went real dry and I swallowed hard as she struggled to think her way through it.  Finally her hands fell limp to her sides and the gun clattered to the floor.  She smiled a wan smile with no eyes to it:

“You idiot,” she murmured.  “I could never kill you; don’t you know that yet?  I wasn’t even aiming at you, and I never miss.  I hit what I aimed at… the bastard!”

And you know, maybe – just maybe – she was telling the truth.

The cops were only too glad to accept our story; after all, with Johnny gone and nobody left to run the store those big brown envelopes they liked so much would disappear forever.

I guess it was just as hard for them to let go of their dream as it was for me to let go of mine.  So I continued to hold onto it: hold onto it real tight.  I held onto my dream of Irma just as tightly as she held onto her dream of herself, with her tight expensive outfits and her tighter expensive underwear her movie star makeup and Hollywood platinum wigs.  As long as we held onto those dreams nobody could touch us – except ourselves.

Still I found myself watching my back closely from time to time while she was around, and watching her just as closely.  But like I said before, she was very easy on the eye.  Watching her closely was the easy part.