T. Oso (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
campkilkare) wrote2009-08-31 11:35 pm
campkilkare) wrote2009-08-31 11:35 pm
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Darling I'm killed
Seven of hearts. Jack of Diamonds. Six of hearts. Six of clubs.
I'm in a puddle on the floor
There are thirteen people in this room. All of them are women; two of them are white. Six of them are playing poker; three of them lean ornamentally against the bar; four of them are seated on sofas, drinking talking about art and movies and politics.
waiting for you to return.
"Cinnamon, turn down that music, baby." Cinnamon is not playing poker. She's wearing a white wrap dress over a rail-thin brown body, and she moves likes a dancer. She turns down the music--
And you bet your life, every night...
--and brings the player who spoke a drink without being asked. The speaker is dark, in a man's suit with a camisole but a necktie. Patterns are shaved into her tight curls. She's the dealer, and she owns the club here on Fourth Street in Santa Maria Embarcadero.
The woman to her left is Chinese, heavy-set, expensively-dressed. She frowns and pulls her hole cards close as Cinnamon dips close with a cocktail, brushing a butterfly kiss against the dealer's cheek as she comes. Two of the women on the sofas are with her.
The girl sitting opposite the dealer is nineteen; legally, she shouldn't be in this club, shouldn't have this beer, shouldn't be holding these cards. Money goes a long way; her beauty goes a little further. This isn't exactly law and order country, anyway. She's wearing diamond studs and a stainless steel ring in the cartilage of her left ear; no other jewelry. A battered leather jacket draped over her chair and faded blue jeans. One of the women standing by the bar (one of the two who isn't Cinnamon) is wearing jeans that are torn and faded, too, but hers came off the shelf like that. The girl with the jacket got hers the hard way. She's a traveller.
There's air conditioning in the club, but it's hot up here. Texas hot, pushing over 100. The dealer turns the river (Ace of Spades), and the women around the table study the cards. Cinnamon sashays (it's the best word for it) back to the bar and the cool contempt and envious nonregard of the other women there.
The Chinese woman folds. The wiry grandmother-type beside her already did a round ago. The traveller tosses in a plaque she traded a thousand dollars for, and the two women past her in rotation swear and fold, their girlfriends moving in to comfort or upbraid. The dealer matches her, though, and then it's time. They call this part the showdown. Cinnamon is holding her breath, a little ostentatiously.
The dealer has a jack and another six. It's a pretty good hand.
The traveller turns over hers. Four, ten. Garbage.
"You bluff very well," says the dealer, kindly.
"Thank you, Carmen," says the traveller. She seems calm; she has a small stack of blue chips left in front of her, and she rises.
"Going already?" Carmen asks.
"A girl has to know her limitations, don't you think?"
Carmen nods. "Cinnamon, cash her out."
One of the ladies from the bar drops into her seat as she rises with her stack; she giggles and asks them to explain the rules again. The traveller suspects she's going to clean them out. The third one, with the long neck and the cheek bones of an anorexic goat, glances at the clock, glares at her lover, and stomps down the stairs; half the room watches the designer jeans slip out of sight. Her lover, hard-jawed, sharp-profiled, hair tied back in a scarf, studies her hands. Some of the remaining attention is focused around a tensely civil power struggle between the grandmother and the white woman to her left over who, exactly, is going to explain the rules to the plump girl in the glittery make-up who has joined the table. (The traveller revises her suspicion to a certainty.) Carmen has eyes only for Cinnamon, which is inconvenient.
"Here you are, Miss Dean." Cinnamon's English is lilting and faintly accented. Charming to be sure.
"This is too much," Miss Dean says, skimming a few hundred back.
"It is?" Cinnamon's eyes are large and brown and shining; Carmen's lips are thin.
"Yes," Miss Dean says. "It is. You ought to be more careful." She leans close enough to count the onyx chips in the other woman's dangling earrings--ladybugs--and takes her risk. "You could get tangled up in something dangerous."
Cinnamon blinks again, all ingenue. "Like what?"
Human trafficking doesn't seem like the polite thing to say. "Oh, just anything," she says, slipping back from the girl. (Twenty? Twenty-five? She has hard lines in her face, close-up, but that's more sun and hard living than time. Cinnamon will look young right up until she's suddenly old, if she lives that long.)
"And what should I do if I find myself in trouble?" she says, coy.
"Maybe you should find someone to help you get out of it," the traveller says.
"But that's what I have Carmen for," she giggles, and trots away.
Speaking of Carmen--her expression says it's time to go.
She goes down the stairs, through the club (it smells like canned air and alcohol and Ecstasy and sex) and out into the South Texas night (heat and asphalt and the high lonesome nothing smell of the desert) and waits, standing beside a small green motorbike.She counts to thirty, and then Cinnamon is there. "You forgot your purse," she says, and the traveller says, "Jessica Herrera sent me."
Cinnamon shoves the purse into her hands. (It's light; empty except for newspapers.) "I don't know a Jessica Herrera."
"Her mother and her brothers died in a shipping container crossing the river fifteen miles from her. The people who they paid to bring them over sold her to a pimp. A human rights group in Austin got her out. She asked me to help."
"How can anyone help something like that?" Her back is to the traveller, her hand is on the door, but she's hesitating.
"Someone could find the person who recieves the traffic on this side. To start with." She waits, and when Cinnamon neither moves nor speaks, she says, "I know who it is. And I have proof."
"This is a dangerous town, Miss Dean. Maybe you should leave. Maybe you should leave tonight." She opens the door to the Red Queens', and the traveller shakes her head.
"I don't fold." Cinnamon glances back, fixing her dark, liquid eyes on the traveller's cold hazel ones.
"Even with a losing hand?"
"CINN! GET YOUR BUTT UP HERE!"
'Alice Dean' breaks the eyelock. "Sounds like somebody needs you."
She walks past the bike; towards the highway that runs past the club. She's been drinking. The motel is close, and the bike will be there in the morning.
She's up to the parking lot of the motel when the white truck rounds a curve, coming fast, the lights out; she hits the dirt at the side of the road ahead of a chatter of automatic fire that splinters the guard rail.
(She hasn't been drinking that much.)
She rolls to her feet shooting, and the pick-up weaves, brakes squealing, merging with the screams from the cab. She moves fast across the highway and flings open the door, the forty-five still in her free hand. (She took the gun from the luggage compartment of the bike while she waited for Cinnamon; she pulled on her motorcycle gloves the minute she left the lot.) Carmen, in the driver's seat, is unarmed, cradling her lover's ruined head in her lap.
"You killed her, you bitch, you killed her, you killed her, you--" Carmen breaks off into her native language. 'Alice'--Rose--speaks pretty good Spanish, but this is too thick and dialectical and foul for her to follow. She catches the drift, though.
"I don't like slavers," she says impassively. "And I don't like people who shoot at me." She tugs the automatic weapon from Cinnamon's perfectly-manicured and already-stiffening fingers and away from Carmen's angry hands, tossing it to the side of the road. "But I tried to give her a chance. If she'd testified about the people she was working with in Mexico--"
"You KILLED her," Carmen shrieks, and she realizes it's not going to sink in. She wonders what will happen to Carmen's club, without the money to be laundered through. She wonders if Carmen was muscle, or someone Cinnamon brought over--owned?--or just a nice butch girl who wasn't smart enough to ask questions or took the answers at face value.
Somehow she expected to feel better about this. How long until there's someone else, in this town or another one, taking the money and bringing in the containers and shaking hands with the pimps from all over the state? The police will investigate this--and the gangsters will up the ante.
She'd promised Jessica Herrara she'd come here. And she had. Everything else belongs to ka.
"You heartless bitch!" Carrmen is sobbing. "You killed her and you don't even care."
She walks back towards the club and the bike. She didn't leave anything at the motel that she needs, that could be traced back to her. Carmen isn't armed, but she's sitting behind the wheel of a couple tons of steel. If Carmen comes after her, she'll have to kill her. It's out of her hands.
She walks back to the club with her gun in her hand, listening--and waiting for the showdown.
Seven of hearts. Jack of Diamonds. Six of hearts. Six of clubs.
I'm in a puddle on the floor
There are thirteen people in this room. All of them are women; two of them are white. Six of them are playing poker; three of them lean ornamentally against the bar; four of them are seated on sofas, drinking talking about art and movies and politics.
waiting for you to return.
"Cinnamon, turn down that music, baby." Cinnamon is not playing poker. She's wearing a white wrap dress over a rail-thin brown body, and she moves likes a dancer. She turns down the music--
And you bet your life, every night...
--and brings the player who spoke a drink without being asked. The speaker is dark, in a man's suit with a camisole but a necktie. Patterns are shaved into her tight curls. She's the dealer, and she owns the club here on Fourth Street in Santa Maria Embarcadero.
The woman to her left is Chinese, heavy-set, expensively-dressed. She frowns and pulls her hole cards close as Cinnamon dips close with a cocktail, brushing a butterfly kiss against the dealer's cheek as she comes. Two of the women on the sofas are with her.
The girl sitting opposite the dealer is nineteen; legally, she shouldn't be in this club, shouldn't have this beer, shouldn't be holding these cards. Money goes a long way; her beauty goes a little further. This isn't exactly law and order country, anyway. She's wearing diamond studs and a stainless steel ring in the cartilage of her left ear; no other jewelry. A battered leather jacket draped over her chair and faded blue jeans. One of the women standing by the bar (one of the two who isn't Cinnamon) is wearing jeans that are torn and faded, too, but hers came off the shelf like that. The girl with the jacket got hers the hard way. She's a traveller.
There's air conditioning in the club, but it's hot up here. Texas hot, pushing over 100. The dealer turns the river (Ace of Spades), and the women around the table study the cards. Cinnamon sashays (it's the best word for it) back to the bar and the cool contempt and envious nonregard of the other women there.
The Chinese woman folds. The wiry grandmother-type beside her already did a round ago. The traveller tosses in a plaque she traded a thousand dollars for, and the two women past her in rotation swear and fold, their girlfriends moving in to comfort or upbraid. The dealer matches her, though, and then it's time. They call this part the showdown. Cinnamon is holding her breath, a little ostentatiously.
The dealer has a jack and another six. It's a pretty good hand.
The traveller turns over hers. Four, ten. Garbage.
"You bluff very well," says the dealer, kindly.
"Thank you, Carmen," says the traveller. She seems calm; she has a small stack of blue chips left in front of her, and she rises.
"Going already?" Carmen asks.
"A girl has to know her limitations, don't you think?"
Carmen nods. "Cinnamon, cash her out."
One of the ladies from the bar drops into her seat as she rises with her stack; she giggles and asks them to explain the rules again. The traveller suspects she's going to clean them out. The third one, with the long neck and the cheek bones of an anorexic goat, glances at the clock, glares at her lover, and stomps down the stairs; half the room watches the designer jeans slip out of sight. Her lover, hard-jawed, sharp-profiled, hair tied back in a scarf, studies her hands. Some of the remaining attention is focused around a tensely civil power struggle between the grandmother and the white woman to her left over who, exactly, is going to explain the rules to the plump girl in the glittery make-up who has joined the table. (The traveller revises her suspicion to a certainty.) Carmen has eyes only for Cinnamon, which is inconvenient.
"Here you are, Miss Dean." Cinnamon's English is lilting and faintly accented. Charming to be sure.
"This is too much," Miss Dean says, skimming a few hundred back.
"It is?" Cinnamon's eyes are large and brown and shining; Carmen's lips are thin.
"Yes," Miss Dean says. "It is. You ought to be more careful." She leans close enough to count the onyx chips in the other woman's dangling earrings--ladybugs--and takes her risk. "You could get tangled up in something dangerous."
Cinnamon blinks again, all ingenue. "Like what?"
Human trafficking doesn't seem like the polite thing to say. "Oh, just anything," she says, slipping back from the girl. (Twenty? Twenty-five? She has hard lines in her face, close-up, but that's more sun and hard living than time. Cinnamon will look young right up until she's suddenly old, if she lives that long.)
"And what should I do if I find myself in trouble?" she says, coy.
"Maybe you should find someone to help you get out of it," the traveller says.
"But that's what I have Carmen for," she giggles, and trots away.
Speaking of Carmen--her expression says it's time to go.
She goes down the stairs, through the club (it smells like canned air and alcohol and Ecstasy and sex) and out into the South Texas night (heat and asphalt and the high lonesome nothing smell of the desert) and waits, standing beside a small green motorbike.She counts to thirty, and then Cinnamon is there. "You forgot your purse," she says, and the traveller says, "Jessica Herrera sent me."
Cinnamon shoves the purse into her hands. (It's light; empty except for newspapers.) "I don't know a Jessica Herrera."
"Her mother and her brothers died in a shipping container crossing the river fifteen miles from her. The people who they paid to bring them over sold her to a pimp. A human rights group in Austin got her out. She asked me to help."
"How can anyone help something like that?" Her back is to the traveller, her hand is on the door, but she's hesitating.
"Someone could find the person who recieves the traffic on this side. To start with." She waits, and when Cinnamon neither moves nor speaks, she says, "I know who it is. And I have proof."
"This is a dangerous town, Miss Dean. Maybe you should leave. Maybe you should leave tonight." She opens the door to the Red Queens', and the traveller shakes her head.
"I don't fold." Cinnamon glances back, fixing her dark, liquid eyes on the traveller's cold hazel ones.
"Even with a losing hand?"
"CINN! GET YOUR BUTT UP HERE!"
'Alice Dean' breaks the eyelock. "Sounds like somebody needs you."
She walks past the bike; towards the highway that runs past the club. She's been drinking. The motel is close, and the bike will be there in the morning.
She's up to the parking lot of the motel when the white truck rounds a curve, coming fast, the lights out; she hits the dirt at the side of the road ahead of a chatter of automatic fire that splinters the guard rail.
(She hasn't been drinking that much.)
She rolls to her feet shooting, and the pick-up weaves, brakes squealing, merging with the screams from the cab. She moves fast across the highway and flings open the door, the forty-five still in her free hand. (She took the gun from the luggage compartment of the bike while she waited for Cinnamon; she pulled on her motorcycle gloves the minute she left the lot.) Carmen, in the driver's seat, is unarmed, cradling her lover's ruined head in her lap.
"You killed her, you bitch, you killed her, you killed her, you--" Carmen breaks off into her native language. 'Alice'--Rose--speaks pretty good Spanish, but this is too thick and dialectical and foul for her to follow. She catches the drift, though.
"I don't like slavers," she says impassively. "And I don't like people who shoot at me." She tugs the automatic weapon from Cinnamon's perfectly-manicured and already-stiffening fingers and away from Carmen's angry hands, tossing it to the side of the road. "But I tried to give her a chance. If she'd testified about the people she was working with in Mexico--"
"You KILLED her," Carmen shrieks, and she realizes it's not going to sink in. She wonders what will happen to Carmen's club, without the money to be laundered through. She wonders if Carmen was muscle, or someone Cinnamon brought over--owned?--or just a nice butch girl who wasn't smart enough to ask questions or took the answers at face value.
Somehow she expected to feel better about this. How long until there's someone else, in this town or another one, taking the money and bringing in the containers and shaking hands with the pimps from all over the state? The police will investigate this--and the gangsters will up the ante.
She'd promised Jessica Herrara she'd come here. And she had. Everything else belongs to ka.
"You heartless bitch!" Carrmen is sobbing. "You killed her and you don't even care."
She walks back towards the club and the bike. She didn't leave anything at the motel that she needs, that could be traced back to her. Carmen isn't armed, but she's sitting behind the wheel of a couple tons of steel. If Carmen comes after her, she'll have to kill her. It's out of her hands.
She walks back to the club with her gun in her hand, listening--and waiting for the showdown.