Dangerous by Default

38. The killer doves

Please god, let me get out of this alive. Pedestrians scattered in fear as the black limo buzzed through the crowded intersection. A man begged them to slow down , but the car sped onwards in blur.

"That's a good little marshmallow" cooed a girlish voice from the other side of the partition. Long golden blonde hair, she was a dead ringer for Goldie Hawn.

A real classic beauty. Terrifying. The Limo driver's heart was racing.

He barreled through another red light at their insistence. A normal driver would be sweating. He'd seen enough over the years to know when use his poker face.

"If you stop this car even once," said the man with the bulging muscles, in a dry Texan accent. His skin was criss-crossed with thick burns, as if he had been raked by the devil himself.

The driver forced a smile.

Wild San Francisco is back. By comparison to the old days, a few freaks in military-style body suits were nothing.

The car careened up Larkin street. Out of nowhere, a man in a shabby coat tripped into the road.

Yipes! The driver yanked the wheel to the right and the long body of the limo cavorted, missing the man by half a foot. He regained control of the swerving limo and accelerated through the yellow light.

"Now that's driving!" shouted the Texan, raising an overflowing flute in the air, only to spill half of its contents on the blonde woman next to him.

"Senegalanisis, you're pissing on me," screeched the girlish voice.

"It's just champagne bitch, and it sounds like ya could use some more." replied the Texan as he reached for a fresh bottle. His hulking body tumbled onto her as the car swerved around a shopping cart.

"Get off me, white trash," cried the girlish voice again.

"Gladly! Look what you did to my pants. Why ya gotta wear so much body glitter, anyways?" The Texan whined back.

As he climbed off of the blonde woman, the driver saw a glimmer of a silver handgun strapped to the man's utility belt. A sigh of recognition. His mind flashed back to an anxious few months in the early 90's, driving for an RnB singer whose bodyguard carried an AK47 strapped similarly under his leather jacket.

Musicians, that's it. They're just musicians.

"Godefrida, what are you thinking about?" asked the Texan to the pensive woman who had been sitting quietly on the bench nearest the door. She had stared out the window silently until now. Her voice stung, cold and direct.

"I was thinking. White Wing better know what she's doing, having us all drop our assignments to come to this dump." The backseat of the limo fell silent as the other passengers pondered her words.

"Ick, who said anything about White Wing?" said the blonde.

"Who do you think is running this, Pulchellus?" replied the woman called Godefrida.

So the Goldie Hawn lookalike has a name. The driver repeated the word in his mouth. Pulchellus. What an odd word. In fact all of their names were odd - Senegalanesis for the hefty Texan. Godefrida was the lead singer sitting quietly in the back. It was as if they had stepped out of a greek fairy tale. He admired how musicians had the bravado to take on a nom de plume and carry it with them in their normal lives. He remembered something a famous drag queen had told him once while sitting on his lap in the backseat. "I wear drag, all this makeup, to feel normal" she said in-between lines of coke. What on earth was normal for these freaks?