Death Orchid

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

She had been dreaming again, causing her sleep to be jilted and confused and as always, her nightmares were unwelcomed.

While she struggled through the rem world, her hands, unknown to her, constantly traveled along the faded white scares that traced along her marred, yet, undeniably stunning face.

During her dreams, or nightmares (she never remembered when she woke what exactly that they were) she often thought of monsters and what they had taken away from her along a Texas desert in a time far past her memory. Denial, often of what she had been and the pain that it had caused everyone she had ever known was her friend.

She glanced at her digital clock on an old pine table nudged next to her low bed. She saw that it was 3 Am. That didn’t surprise her, she seldom slept. Fire fluming out a burning blow torch in her dreams went with the turf of being a cold blooded killer.

She thought of London, where on loan, a contract killer for a NJ mobster, she had cold blooded murdered a Mafia Don.

As she woke in her loft above the private club she owned, JASON’S and for a moment she thought she saw Anthony (The Fat Man) Uruguay sitting in chair in front of her, casually smoking one of his cigars, a 9 millimeter in his obese hand.

As her mind cleared, his gruesome vision faded as her eyes looked up through the glass ceiling of her loft into the clear Las Vegas night, where a billion stars were planted into the sky. After some moments of hyperventilating, she calmed, for she remembered that “The Fat Man” was dead and that she had been responsible for his murder.

Of course another man’s memory forever revolved through her memory.

He had been a badly burnt, ex-soldier poet that she had deeply loved and also died because of her careless ways.

She copiously wept on the bad days, which there were many. Often she wondered how many tears could be trapped within her and when would they stop. They never did and they never washed away his memory from her soul.

Having escaped with her valueless life from her violent boyfriend Fat Tony, A Mafia Don in New Jersey and the other men who sought to murder her, had left her free, rich and more f****d up then before, if that was at all possible.

Looking at the clock again it blinked back at her the time: 4 AM.

Moaning in genuine mental distress, she wondered where the hour had vanished too. As was the case, her gifted OCD/Bi Polar mind was playing tricks on her once more and it disturbed her greatly.

Laying naked under her white down comforter, she allowed her hands to fall down along her impossibly thin and narrow body. Feeling each strident rib, she forced herself to remember that she simply had to eat more. At five-foot ten, she weighed a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. No matter how she tried she could not gain a pound.

Tomorrow she would be twenty-eight years old and she promised herself that new and positive resolutions would begin in her life starting with her birthday.

It would not be the first time and certainly not the last time that she had deceived herself.

Calming a little, her eyes moved around the five thousand square foot loft, that alike another dangerous artist, not that far away from her, she had bought, gutted, redesigned and now lived in. It was situated above the unique private club she now owned and ran making serious money while doing it.

It was named ‘JASONS’ for the obvious reason.

It was the name of the burnt ex-soldier who had been murdered in inferno Flats, a Texas piss hole, where the showdown with Fat Tony and his crew of killer had finally gone down.

The vast room was completely open, just four walls, all glass paned, walls, roof, skylights, giving it any structure at all. Her bed was at the far end nudged against a wall of windows.

Hypnotized, she gazed out at the sparkling lights of the Las Vegas Strip about a mile away. Being a night person, her view gave her pleasure as well somehow calming her mind.

Looking to her right, she gazed past antique pine amours, a few desks and chairs. The place was sparse with furnishing, yet what she had was mostly old English and very expensive, not to mention unique.

Across the pine floored room, about a hundred feet and near the door-that-lead down to the club, was her office. Loving antiques and things with character, she had bought a sprawling pine desk. It was a two hundred year old beauty from Ireland.

Having hordes of money, she had out bid a local real estate mogul for it; a man she’d seen often at Las Vegas Planning Commission Meetings. He was a man she hated for all of the obvious reasons. What she did not know, that another odd, strange and lethal man she had yet to meet, abhorred him even more.

After the auction the slick, Metro Male millionaire had tried to hit on her.

Disliking the rich men of Las Vegas as much as she disliked anything phony, she’d been cruel in her rebuff. The ego centric powerful gym built Millionaire and a most important man had not taken it lightly.

After calling her a b***h, he stormed off and their relationship, the few times they had butted heads at Council meetings was rocky to say the least. The fact that she had a male counterpart in her dislike for the shallow creep living in another loft so close bye, escaped her knowledge.

Soon though, she would know better.

Rising, she sat on the edge of her bed staring at her unpolished toes.

After counting them several times and not knowing why, she lifted her head and looked off at the two computers sitting on the pine desk of her office. Next to them were other old pine file cabinets and sitting on various tables were piles of papers.

Kind of averting her eyes, she was hesitant looking at them and the computer. She begun to write again and many of things that flowed straight from her mind, down her fingers to the keyboard and on to the computers monitor and in and out of her printer were lying there.

Not wanting any part of that nightmare so early in the morning, she turned her head staring into a mirror. Her white blond hair was shorter than ever. No more than four inches of hair popped off of her noggin, actually making her appear-even more beautiful for there was no hair to cause any distraction from her face.

Numb, she again trailed her finger along the numerous, faded white scars on her face and white eyebrows.

Having paid a man to beat her once to make her mental duress go away and after the whacking she had gotten from a girl named Sue and some other pretty tough Texas characters she thought that her face finally had been transformed.

Unbelievably, after some time the brutal RELIEF beatings had only, as they’d done before in New Jersey gave her some relief from her suicidal brain and simply left light, ski trails along her face, giving it character and somehow making her more exotic than ever before.

Being nobody’s fool and being quite clear on what power and control her beauty gave her, especially dealing with weak man, she paid a plastic surgeon, because her breathing was impaired to re-straighten her nose, the one Billy Cox at Inferno Flats so casually had broken. Sometimes, and for reasons she could not understand, she thought of Billy with a smidgen of remorse. For some convoluted reason she would have liked to talk to the violent Hill Billy again, but of course he was dead too.

Sitting on the side of her bed she looked across the wooden floor of her loft to where a complete set of black iron weights were anchored to the floor.

Having kept her promise, that if she escaped death after she scooted from Inferno Flats and the violent Cox brothers in the Texas desert to quit smoking, she had semi kept that oath.

There was something about smoking and writing and late at night when the devils visited her and she wrote her own brand of poetry, she often smoked and drank Wild turkey while she placed the blood of her thoughts onto her computer monitor.

Normally not a drinker, she often sipped tequila or Wild Turkey as she smoked and wrote.

Always promising herself she would never do it again.

But of course she was never good at keeping promises to anyone, especially herself. How many had died because of her broken promises; well she could no longer remember.

Trying not to beat herself up any longer for not being perfect, she succeeded somewhat, and slowly began to cut herself some slack, because if she did not she knew she would simply kill herself.

As she sat on the edge of her bed going through her usual torturous thinking routine her eyes drifted over to one of two loves of her life; one being her mountain bike leaning near the stairs.

Having become a solo long distant rider, she bought the finest machine available. The sixteen-gear, silver Titanium, Japanese Shimano mountain bike leaned against the wall. It was silently waiting, almost begging her with its beauty for her to get off of her small ass and get it going.

Literally loving her bicycle, she felt that it had saved her life.

Though she owned an old ford F-150 pick-up truck, mostly used to get bar and restaurant supplies for her club, she almost entirely used her bike for transportation and exercise to get from here to there. She often did fifty-miles at a clip and with her backpack stitched to her back she did long oval circuits on Saturday and Sunday mornings hitting Vegas garage sales, buying odd and unusual things as she did. Quirky, was but one of many words those that came in contact with her often used to describe her.

Deadly and disturbed would have been words far better used to describe her.

Smiling as she looked at her rubber wheeled lover, her eyes glanced at the bench press and the black weights strung along the chrome bars.

Upon first arriving in Vegas some time ago, she had joined a gym with those-road-to-hell paved good attentions being set solidly in her constitution.

Gold’s gym, though a supremely outfitted place at first seemed the right place to be.

After a few workouts she never went back again.

In her Nike black gym togs, Van tennis sneakers and either a white or black sleeveless T-shirt and black leather weight gloves, she was stunning. Of course having a way lean body filling it all out and a face that took a-human beings breath away didn’t help either. She’d become an instant magnet to the most soulless men as well as a few women she thought un-imaginable at the gym and she hated every moment being there.

The new ‘Metro Male’ as they were called, with shaved armpits, waxed chests and backs and tanning bed smiles as well as stinking of cheap colognes made her want to vomit.

The fact that she was now the most exotically beautiful woman in a city that was proud of its cache of gorgeous i***t’s, simply made it impossible for her to be left alone.

Beauty for beauties sake was valueless, destructive, empty, vapid and of course she knew that better than anyone.

Absolutely impossible to be impressed by any physical trapping left on earth, she bought her bike, her weights. After some time, she was as lean and as muscular as God allowed any women to be.

The truth as it may be was that if she put her face in a wood chipper, she wouldn’t have minded. Beauty met nothing to her. It was and has always been about an artist’s passion and brains that turned her on.

The fact that she had not had s*x in well over 2 years didn’t bother her much; though she was a very s****l animal indeed.

It was unimaginable for her to think that she could ever share a bed or a floor or a kitchen counter with the type of men she’d seen in Las Vegas up until the moment. Liking women as well, she had yet to meet one that mentally attracted her, though there were many who had all the bells and whistles of silicone, bleach and Botox and the rest of a litany of falseness touted as special in a most fake world driven media.

Lately she’d been voraciously reading every psycho-babble book she could get her hands on. Through them she had come to realize she needed something special in a lover, as sick as that special need might be.

Her love was books, and her book shelves with over a thousand books on them were aligned against her wall and they gave her solace. If a book could give a girl an orgasm, well they were her lovers.

Why the f**k not.

Being the least bull s**t and material girl and above all being the most independent gal on earth did not help matters. She liked pain and she yearned to be degraded sexually and that added to her fierce independence as well as her confusion.

Where she could ever meet a lover who might understand all of that, as intricate as it was, or over power her, least of all understand her, go toe to toe with her, she simply did not have a clue.

She needed to be dominated.

Unknown to her she perhaps was about to meet a man and a woman that filled that bill to a level she thought impossible to achieve.

Sometimes a girl should stop dreaming for things she doesn’t understand while she is in front of the game.

Be careful what a girl wishes for her wish chest, it just might appear as a 38 lead slug in her head. No one knew that better than she.

Paris and what had happened to her there, was often on her mind.

It gave her some hope for her salvation.

Thus she began remembering Paris, as she laid down on her bed, winced, diabolical memories of Paris flaming in her mind.