Tastes Like Candy

Thirty

Thirty

Michelle

Trina stood frozen, hand still caught in her hair, nostrils flaring as she breathed. The longer she stared at the wire, the more Michelle knew, in her gut, that she was standing across from an ATF agent.

Fuck.

Stepping backward, slowly, carefully, she reached the door and turned the lock; it slid into place with a smooth snick.

"Take it off," she said, a whisper that would sound like static across the mic.

All traces of the ditzy waitress bled out of Trina, seeming to take some of her tan with them. The act dropped away, and in its place, a sharp, frightened, calculating federal agent. The transformation was sudden and startling.

She lowered her arm slowly, gaze tracking up and down Michelle, assessing.

"Take it off," Michelle whispered again. "If you alert your friends" – and they had to be waiting in a van or something out on the street – "they can arrest us, sure, but they can't get in here in time to save your life." Gaze trained on the agent, she reached down quickly and drew the knife from her boot, brandished it down low by her leg, so the light glinted along the length of the blade. "Do you want to collar us? Or do you want to live?"

She watched the decision happen behind the woman's eyes. Saw the jerky nod.

"In the sink," Michelle instructed. "Slowly."

Trina raised her shirt up inch by inch to reveal the small mic pack taped to her skin, removed the strips, as told, slowly. The wire caught in the shirt collar and she gave it a tug, dropped the whole of the device into the sink.

"Turn the water on."

She did, and then whoever was on the other end was doubtless getting an earful of static. And then nothing.

"What's your real name?" Michelle asked at a regular volume.

"Fuck you."

She shrugged. "Alright, Trina. How long have you been under?"

"Like I said before."

"You're one hell of an actress, I'll give you that," Michelle said. "Or else you really are that stupid, which, given what's happening now, would be a good bet."

Trina folded her arms. She was almost a head taller than Michelle, and her posture emphasized the fact. "There's something I haven't been able to figure out," she said, a humorless smile twisting her lips. "The groupies I get. They have nothing better to do with their lives, and at the end of the day, they're just passing through anyway. They don't know anything and they don't owe anything. But you guys? The old ladies? Why the fuck would anyone want to throw their lives away like that? I mean, your boy, he's alright in the sack, but he's sure as shit not worth going to jail over."

Michelle's stomach turned over, and she felt a dark, angry smile streak across her face. She tightened her grip on the knife handle, the smooth bone of the hilt pressing against the freshly-healed bones in her hand until it hurt. Bones. It always came back to bones, didn't it? This club was in her bones.

"You don't have any idea who I am, do you?"

The smug look faltered.

"You think he picked me up at the Armadillo some night? A child with a bad boy fetish?" The chuckle bubbled up out of her throat before she could register what it meant. She glanced down at the knife to steady herself, the shining steel a touchstone, a comfort.

"Let me explain something to you," she continued. "The women who choose to become old ladies are a special kind of mad. Who would want pubs and knife fights and late night calls from the police when they could have cozy little houses and boring day jobs? Insane, that was my mother. Reckless.