What Comes Around

CHAPTER 6

The elevator to the Penthouse Suite opened inside the apartment foyer. It was exquisite, just as Harding would have imagined the best rooms in the best hotel in Paris might be, full of soft evening light, with huge arrangements of fresh flowers everywhere, and through the open doors, a large terrace overlooking the lights of Paris and the misty gardens below.

Crystal smiled demurely and led him into the darkened living room. She showed him the bar and told him to help himself. She’d be right back. Slipping into something a little more comfortable, he imagined, smiling to himself as he poured two fingers of Johnnie Walker Blue and strolled over to a large and very inviting sofa by the fireplace.

He kicked his shoes off, stretched out and took a sip of whiskey. He was just getting relaxed when he heard an odd hissing sound. Looking down at the floor he saw that the little fuckhead Rikki Nelson had just peed all over his Guccis.

“Shit!” he said under his breath.

“Hey!” he heard her call out.

“What?”

“Turn on some music, Harding, I want to dance!” she called out from somewhere down a long dark hall.

He got to his feet and staggered a few feet in the gloom, cracking his shin on an invisible marble coffee table.

“What? Music? Where is it?”

“Right below the bar glasses. Just push ‘on,’ It’s all loaded up and ready to rip.”

He limped over to the bar and hit the button.

Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore!” filled the room.

“Is that it?” he shouted over Dino.

“Hell, yeah, son. Crank it!”

He somehow found the volume control, cranked it, and went out to the terrace, away from the bar’s booming overhead speakers. The rain was pattering on the drooping awning overhead and the night smelled like… like what… jasmine? No, that wasn’t it. Something, anyway. It definitely smelled like something out here.

“Hey, you!” she shouted from the living room’s open doorway. “There he is! There’s my big stud. Come on in here, son. Let’s dance! Waltz your ass on in here, baby boy, right now!”

He downed his drink and went inside. Crystal stood in the center of the room wearing a skintight black leather bodysuit that would have put the Catwoman to shame. She had little Rikki Nelson cuddled in her arms, nuzzling her with kisses.

“Where’s the whip?” he said.

“Oh, I’ll dig one up somewhere, don’t you worry.”

Harding collapsed into the nearest armchair and stared.

“Why are you staring like that at me and Rikki?” she pouted.

“Just trying to figure out whether or not that leash is on the wrong bitch.”

Give her credit, she laughed.

“I sure hope to hell you know how to dance, mister,” she said. “Now get up and get with it, I mean it.”

He hauled himself manfully up out of the leather chair.

You do what you have to do, he reminded himself.

And he danced.

And danced some more.