Mo & Curio and the Cunt with the Funny Hat

"He gonna expect that every time now, I guess." Angelle spoke aloud toward the door.

"We gave him something he likes. Why the hell wouldn't he ask for it again? He's fuckin payin'."

"Look, it was fun tonight. But it ain't my thing and you ain't welcome here no longer."

"Really?" She smiled with all the giggly silliness of a thirteen-year-old geek being told by the stud QB she was cute. "You don't say!"

Curio smiled, both spiteful bile and the hot blood of the hunt suddenly mixing in the veins. For hours, she had played the pair off each other like Rock-em, Sock-em robots. Neither had laid a hand on her with near the malice with which she had lavished upon their flesh in the name of bliss.

Eager and wet for the ever-so-releasing kill, she reigned with the whip, the tongue, and the derision for him that came so naturally. He was the literal law of the land for the state of Mississippi. Maybe in the future, a President, a Federal judge, Senator. Who knew where the dynamite in the head of his soaring rocket would explode.

Knowing the man could literally put a needle in her arm...and Moses' arm as well, a fact that had helped her sting the ass with the whip that much more insightfully...for crimes she had committed in the state made her almost crazy with lust. She was boiling over well before ever allowing him to touch her.

Angelle had started getting into the scene after realizing Stuart wanted her to comply with the domination of him instinctively. Curio was a sultry, surly Gephetto with blowjob lips and contempt for them both. That especially bothered the older woman. When he was literally licking Angelle's feet graciously on his knees, again Angelle had looked at Curio in the middle of the sex with that same cold sneer that Curio had hated when they met. She thought Curio might not have seen it.

Curio did.

Angelle looked over her shoulder as Curio rolled over toward the nightstand.

"I'm glad you found it fun to beat the hell out of my meal ticket but you may never get to see him again. I'm the one who'll have to put on that kinda show every week with some other weird bitch du jour from now on."

"Kinda turned him out, didn't we though?" Curio stretched, wiping a smear on her finger down the headboard. The bed was not bolted and painted to the wall like at some normal no-tell. It was an actual bed and frame. She made sure her wet fingers made smears on the back of the varnished wood.

"We didn't do shit but make him get off. You think you did something? You're just a flavor. You're nothing but green peppermint when he gets chocolate mousse royale everyday. So what?"

"I think he kinda appreciated the extra touch, Ain-jel." Curio's hand clasped around the narrow base of a thin, metal lamp, also not bolted to the wall. The Edison expected no one dropping three bills a night would be hocking the amenities.

Angelle turned her face toward the door. She sighed softly. "He don't know what he likes. He's a fuckin man." Her face turned slightly toward Curio. "You need to get going. I can call Twyla and she can come get you. Or get a cab. You've been well-paid." Better than he ever paid any of those other bitches he's ordered over here...

"I do need to leave. No doubt about that, Ain-jel." Lightning-quick, the lamp swung and connected against the right side of Angelle's head. The blow was solid. Curio heard the bone crunch. Angelle was driven to the left, her left temple smacking the headboard abruptly. Curio was up in an instant, trying to coil up the flailing electrical cord in one hand as she brought the lamp down on the woman's head a few more times. One blow sent the tan shade flying across the room in a hail of broken light bulb glass.

The woman was incapacitated after the second blow. She never even screamed. Curio flipped the lamp onto the bed and straddled her. Angelle's head was bleeding from two tears above the brow. Curio set about strangling her with her bare hands.

"Remember, it's a crime of passion, baby." Moses instructed her as they drove to kill the real Debra. "She can't be stabbed or shot. Attorney Generals don't do that kinda thing. It's gotta look like she got uppity or somethin'. Tried to blackmail him or whatever. He gets pissed, ain't thinkin right. Hits her hard. Sees what he done, know she's really pissed or really hurt. Or both. So then he gotta finish it, clean up best he can. Can't look too pro or quick. Most people don't know how to strangle or hit a motherfucker upside the head in the right place to kill 'em. They fuck it up. You gotta fuck up enough to make it look hasty, but not like a woman done it. A pissed off and later scared to death man done it. It's important."

She squeezed her tiny hands around the unconscious woman's neck.

"Most people, they use a pillow to smother someone. Takes too long." Moses, from a year before in her mind. Whittling, she remembered as she squeezed and grunted astride the woman's neck, a long spear tip from a piece of Osage- orange he managed to get his hands on somehow. "You either gotta tie off the neck with a tourniquet. A ligature, I think the proper name is. Or you crack that hyoid bone in the neck and both it and the swelling of the glottis around it fills up the top of the windpipe and stifles the airflow."

Curio was painting her nails as he spoke and whittled, but listening to every word.

She ground down with all of her weight and strength, watching the woman's lips turn blue beneath the smear of blood after a while.

"You gotta be sure." Moses warned her as they approached the train station. "Take your time when she's down to make she don't get back up. Oxygen deprivation is a funny thing. Unfortunately, miracles happen with it sometimes. You think, shit. I done been choking out this fucker for five minutes. He dead as Hitler. Blue mouth, red eyeballs. Limp as the Pope's dick. But you fuck up and don't be completely sure and the paramedics find her and next thing you know, she is all droolie and twitchy, sitting in a motorized wheelchair in a witness booth pointing a palsy finger at you and got one helluva story to tell about you. She'll be sure to throw what a miracle it is that she is still alive and how she found God and all that shit."

"I got it. Pushing up daisies in hell, sir. Right away, sir. To the task, sir!" She saluted and smirked sexily at him.

"Don't fuck up then. That's an order, sexy."

"No problem, baby." They kissed as they pulled up at the train station.

Curio was amazed at how tired she got exerting the focused pressure of her hands. Never before had she wished she weighed twenty pounds more, but she would gladly have traded some cheese in the arms to have that much more power in her pressing. The face turned blue, almost purple. The shoulders convulsed slightly, as if Angelle was trying to shake out of a sleep. Curio cursed under her breath and kept up the pressure unimpeded. Adrenaline kicked in and she realized her thumbs were several inches deep in the throat.

After a while, she was bored from it but pressed on. The twitching stopped and she watched for any further sign and received none. With one hand still wrapped firmly, she felt for a pulse and got nothing in the neck. She released and stood up, panting as she wiped sweat she had not realized was pooled on her brow. Suddenly conscious of time, she rushed to the window and threw open the curtains. Not knowing which room of the adjacent hotel Moses and Pete were in, she nevertheless knew they were watching intently. Waving and smiling, she cupped her breasts in her hands and rocked from side-to-side. A flashlight flashed for a moment from a third floor window.

Checking for signs of life one more time and finding none, she pulled the cum-soaked washcloth from where it had fallen from between Angelle's closed legs and threw it in the bathroom to be found later. Pulling one of the q-tips with the real Debra's blood, she rubbed the swab across the edge of the bathroom sink, just enough to get a smear. She did not worry about her own fingerprints as Moses worried about his. There were not many surfaces she touched that would hold a latent, anyway. She was careful about it, but not meticulously so. Her prints were not on file anywhere, except perhaps in some case files somewhere under the name "Unsub". Police for "unknown subject." As long as she was never arrested, she was merely Unsub to a great many paunchy detectives wondering who killed a wayward gangster.

She slipped into the leather bodysuit, admiring the fit in the mirror as she preened her hair in the dead woman's vanity mirror, just as she had done before picking up her murderer some four-plus hours before. Her compact came out and she painted herself up again after scrubbing away the red eye paint with a wet washcloth that went into her purse. Curio applied a pale shade of base, then penciled her eyes black and outlined her lips. A quick brushing of eye shadow and neutral lip balm and she was ready to be public.

From the nightstand, she picked up a book of matches and arranged a match to burn as a fuse toward its counterparts.

"Shit!" She forgot the nails. She fumbled for a cuticle knife in her kit and found it. Some of Stuart Whitman's chest was bundled up beneath a few of her nails. Working over a pad of hotel stationary at the vanity table, she delicately scraped her nails clean onto the white paper. Carefully, she got on her knees next to the corpse and set about jamming the bits of his skin far up under a few of the corpse's nails. The rest of the fragments, she carried into the bathroom and flicked them into the washcloth. Then she closed the bathroom door to try to preserve the contents within in case no one came to snuff the fire too soon.

Straining, she rolled the body onto the bed, laying her on her side so the arms would hang over the side of the bed, ostensibly to preserve the skin in the nails as much as possible. Curio figured it was a long stretch, but if the investigators could get a sample to work with, so much the better. Getting paranoid of the timeline, she hurried.

Giving the unopened champagne bottle a shake, she popped the cork and let it spray. It would make it look all the more amateurish. Only a frantic idiot looking for any possible accelerant would use champagne. Again, she hoped for the swift actions of the hotel staff to get the fire out. She took a long celebratory swig from it and then doused the naked body in cold foam. Taking a long deep breath, closing her eyes, she tried to rethink anything she might have fucked up and came up empty. Looking at the bare ass one more time, she shrugged.

"I did you a favor, bitch." She stuffed the matches in between the mattress and box spring and dangled a corner of the comforter over the area where the combined ignition of twenty-four matched was erupt as the lone match burned into them. "A few years from now, you woulda been some old whore complaining about how everything drooped and jingled. Having to pick up middle-tier sales managers over at 1001 for a hundred a toss. You loser cunt, you."

Curio Phelonie flicked a Bic flame under the match head, snatched up the pile of hundreds Stuart Whitman left behind for the two ladies and jammed them down her bodysuit. One last look around and she walked smartly from the room.

She was barely descending the second floor stairs of the parking garage when the alarm went off. Crossing the street, she eased nonchalantly into the back seat of the big Cutlass, giving Pete a thumbs-up and blowing Moses a kiss to his gaze in the rearview mirror as he pulled away.

Before she, Moses and Pete made their way across State Street and merged into midnight traffic leaving the clubs heading for the Reservoir for late-night libations or heading home, the frantic staff had forced the door open in room 454, dragged the barely-burned body out into the hall and were performing CPR. Their efforts went for naught.

The bubbly front desk clerk started her wigging-out just about the instant one of the rent-a-cops the hotel used to keep the riff-raff away at night doused the mattress fire with an extinguisher.

As the trio drove north to pick up Grizzly, Curio pulled her hooker fare from under her tits and counted it.

"Shit fellas! I'm in the wrong line of work. Anyone wanna make a trip to Vicksburg?"

Four days later, a scathing rant by local TV commentator Frank Melton described the murder of a local woman in the Edison Walthall as heinous and barbaric, insisting that whomever perpetrated the crime be tried for capital murder and wishing the Jackson Police Godspeed in seeing she receive swift and unflinching justice.

The next morning, Doreen passed on a courtesy call from the local NBC affiliate, which Melton owned, to her boss, Stuart Whitman. Hearing the list of questions aimed squarely at him, Whitman knew they had been dropped into the reporters' laps by whomever killed Angelle. It was a setup job, one that he knew he would not, and could not recover from. When the Governor requested a private meeting with him and the head of the Mississippi Bureau of Investigations some twenty minutes later, Whitman politely said that would not be necessary, but that the governor should probably get his short list together. And he hung up on Gov. Kirk Fordice.

Attorney General Stuart Whitman raised the window of his seventh floor office, shaking his head in resignation. Not believing his luck and cursing his fallibility, he made one long gaze across the skyline of the capital city of the state that should have been all his to rule one not too distant day and jumped out, managing to kill both himself and a middle-tier sales manager. The unlucky landing pad was just in from Tupelo walking hurriedly on his one -hour lunch break to see a working girl named Justine over at the Edison Walthall.