Lock, Croc and Two Smoking Barrels

"What do you want?" He looked out to him, reaching behind him to his wife's shoulder, touching something that felt more like luggage than his lovely wife. He turned. Asleep next to him was a green scaly monstrosity with anomalously nice boobs. He jumped away from the monster and fell to the floor. The monster stood from his bed and walked around.

"I wasn't asleep, I swear." Odile shook her head and rubbed her eye with her knuckle.

"It's OK, sweetie." Michael said, returning his attention to the man. "Davit, near as I can tell, you're the one in charge of the gang, organized crime, whatever it is, that my brother used to work for." Michael said. "They told me to deliver some drugs down south through a swamp or else they'd have him killed in jail. But they weren't real drugs. It was a setup so I would encounter her and she would kill me for trespassing on her swamp."

Davit was still trying to catch his breath. The nude green woman bent down to one knee, looking at him. "When I was younger," Odile hissed. "I remember the first human boy I saw. He saw me near a beach, and we just looked at each other. He wasn't afraid of me. I wasn't afraid of him. We fascinated each other. Neither of us had ever seen something like the other before. He ran off to his father when he heard him calling. I never saw him again."

She leaned in. "Was that you? Is that how you knew to send people you didn't like into the swamp?"

Davit blinked. "When was this?"

"Ten cycles ago."

"Ten years ago?" Davit blinked again. "No, that wasn't me. Ten years ago, I was thirty-nine."

Odile looked a little perturbed. "Oh." She said simply.

Davit pointed at Michael. "Was it him? Looks like he's about the right age."

"No, it wasn't me." Michael swore. "If she'd told me that happened ten years ago, I would've told her you couldn't have been that boy, but..."

"Then why were you sending people to my swamp to get eaten?" Odile asked.

"You were eating them?"

Odile stared at him. "Did you know I existed before right now?"

"No, I did not. Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you? I have so many questions, it's boggling."

"Then why were you sending people into my swamp?"

"The first time I did it, the guy disappeared. I sent him with fake drugs to go meet up with the Cubans who were flying in on a seaplane. They said he didn't show, so I figured he drowned or got pulled into a wormhole or the..." He looked at her. "the animals might have gotten him. When it worked a second time, I figured it was a pretty good way to get rid of people. No burying bodies, plenty of plausible deniability."

"If you didn't know, why did we have some of your people trying to get her out of the animal park where she was working?"

Davit shook his head. "I don't know what you mean. It's not like my subordinates tell me every little thing they do. Maybe someone below me knew about it, but thought I wouldn't believe it until they could bring you to me. Which is true. I wouldn't have believed it if they told me they were wasting time to capture a man-eating swamp monster."

Michael's eyes fell on Odile. "If there was someone who knew, we must have already encountered them, or they went to the police before we could. The only one who seemed to know was Sue, but she's out of the picture."

Davit looked at them uncomfortably. "What did you do to her?"

"She's alive... probably." Michael said. "She only ate part of her."

"What the hell did you do that for? She doesn't work for me! She just comes around and acts like it!"

"She shot at both of us!" Odile hissed.

A long pause. Davit threw up his hands. "All right. I'll give you that one, then. So... are you going to eat me?"

"I'd honestly rather not." Odile said. "So... he's got something for you."

Michael reached into his bag and pulled out a laptop. He put it on the bed, facing Davit. Reaching across, he typed in the name of a banking website.

He paused. "What's your wireless password?"

"I'm not telling you my wireless password."

"If you knew what we were planning, you wouldn't care."

Davit scoffed. "I'll type it in myself, thank you." He did so, and the laptop connected to the Internet. Michael brought them back to the banking website. "How much do you have in the bank?"

Davit typed in his information. The number came up, which he announced out loud. "About eight million."

"Transfer seven million to this account." Michael handed him a folded piece of paper with a nine-digit number on it.

Davit looked at him, finding himself staring down the barrel of the firearm. "Seven? You're not going to take it all?"

"We can, if you want."

"No, I like the first deal better." Davit typed it in and authorized the transfer. Watching the number jump down felt draining. He sighed heavily and closed the laptop. "Now what?"

"Go outside." Michael instructed.

"I'm going to get dressed first." Davit went to his closet and pulled out some new clothes. He selected a new suit, dark blue, with fashionable tie and cufflinks. Odile stayed near him as he dressed. Michael packed the laptop back into his messenger bag, but only after a few important keystrokes.

"I have another memory." Odile piped up. Michael looked at her across the room. Davit continued to dress as he listened. "My earliest memory was being picked up when I was very small. I assume I would've still fit in my egg... if I actually came from an egg. I remember being picked up by a man... who I reckon may have been my father. I don't know who else could get so close to me.

"He held me in both hands and dropped me in a little white pool. The pool quickly turned into the most intense whirlpool I reckon I've ever seen. After being tossed around, I wandered around these tubes, which brought me to bigger cavernous tubes and... eventually, into the swamp.

"It was only when I came back to the city... did I realize what the whirlpool was. It's where you city folk... put the stuff you have no use for. The stuff you never, ever want to see again."

Davit's hands stopped in the middle of tying his full Windsor. He turned to her. "I'm sorry that happened to you." He said gently. "I would not have done that. If I'd known you earlier in your life, I would have given you a job."

"Sue said she would keep me locked up and eating people like the Flint-Stones."

Davit squinted. "What episode of the Flintstones has cannibalism? Anyway, Sue was a bitch. Who cares what she says? What I mean is, I'd let you work for our organization."

"Did you ever give it a name?" Michael asked.

"If our group has no name, they can't have an FBI file on us." Davit finished tying his tie. "At least, that's what I thought fifteen years ago. I bet they just put it under Operation: Dandelion or something else something else decidedly non-masculine."

Fully dressed, Davit looked at himself in the mirror, and presented himself to the only female in the room. "How's my hair?"

"You're asking me?" Odile's hand came down on her bald scalp.

"You ready?" Michael said. "Head outside."

Davit walked down the stairs, and his hand reached the doorknob before he realized he wasn't being followed. He looked back. His house felt as empty as when he first arrived. Davit turned the doorknob to his front door and walked down the steps. Behind the wall, he could see red and blue lights flickering. He reached the gate. At least four SWAT members had rifles trained at him.

"Hands up!" The commander shouted.

Davit instead pressed a button near the gate, causing it to slide open. The SWAT poured in. "On the ground!" They commanded.

He did not get on the ground. This was real Italian silk. He did put his hands above his head without being asked. He was cuffed and dragged into a police car.

Among the chaos, a woman in a short skirt and blazer walked into the house. She walked around the house slowly, her heels making gentle taps against the hardwood floors as she did. She went up the stairs and found the bedroom, turning the corner to find Michael and Odile tangled in the expensive sheets of Davit's bed.

The agent cleared her throat. They looked up from the bed and freed themselves from the sheet's entanglement. Michael adjusted himself under his jeans and greeted the agent.

"Hello, Kris." He said. "If that is your real name."

"I'm not a spy." Kris smiled. "I'm WITSEC. Witness protection."

"How did you get involved in this?" Michael asked.

"I should ask you the same question." Kris said as they started to walk out of the mansion. "Of course, I'm limited in what I can tell you, but... did you ever wonder why photography wasn't allowed in Salty Peter's Cove of Fun?"

"What are you talking about? People took pictures with Salty Peter all day long. He even took a few with his eyes open."

"It's a rule. It's on the list of rules at the entrance. See... people under federal witness protection aren't allowed to contact the media, and they're almost always hesitant to get their picture taken." Kris explained as they walked out of the mansion. "So... you're right. It couldn't possibly be him."

Michael stared at her. Odile gently came to his side. "Salty Peter's is a weird place."

"It's the happiest place in Florida..." Kris crowed the corporate message admirably, adding, "south of Orlando."

A pause. Odile looked back at the other officers. Nobody was paying attention to her, the scaly Valkyrie standing nude in the lawn. "What happens to us now?"

"I'm sure the justice department would be interested in your testimony..." Kris said. "But I don't see how you could do that without exposing your friend to scrutiny... which I'm sure you don't want." She sighed. "So... if anyone asks, I'll tell them you two just... slipped away."

Michael looked about, at the night sky, and at his reptilian girlfriend. He held her hand sideways, unable to weave his fingers between hers with the webbing between her fingers. They turned to leave, vanish into the night.

Kris spoke up again, hand outstretched. "I will need that laptop back."

"Damn." Michael stopped. "This thing is awesome." He took it out of the messenger bag, which was actually his.

Kris took it back and held it under her arm. "We couldn't hear everything in there, but... why seven million?"

"Everyone deserves to have enough money to defend themselves in court." Michael said. "I figured a million gives him a better chance than my brother got with the public defender."

"You know Avanovich probably has several bank accounts, right?"

Michael blinked. "I did not know that."

"And they'll ALL be frozen now he's in federal custody."

Michael was silent.

Kris finally laughed. "You really aren't a criminal, are you?"

"No, ma'am."

"So where did the seven million go?"

"To the Everglades Foundation."

Kris leaned back a bit. "Wow. You sure you didn't want to use that to disappear and protect yourself from whoever is left who wants to kill you?"

Odile brought Michael closer, pressing herself against his back, her arm across his stomach. "Let them try."

Kris took Michael's hand, leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. "Good luck out there. If you need anything, of if you get yourselves in trouble, you have my card."

"Thank you, Kris." They turned to leave again, but Kris stopped them again, raising her arm.

"Here's a memo." She said. Michael turned back. She held several sheets of paper, rolled into a tube, held in her gently closed fist. Michael accepted it and walked off. He flipped through the document, trying not to look like he was going for 'the good parts,' even though he absolutely was.

On page six, there was a picture, possibly taken from a cell phone, of Kris' lower body with her skirt hiked up around her waist, revealing her nude lower half. Finally, he thought, she'd graduated from the photocopier and into the art of the obscene selfie.

"What now?" Odile walked along with Michael as they slipped out the gate.

"I don't know." Michael confessed. "We're free, I guess. No more cages for either of us." They approached his car, parked a little ways off. Michael flipped through the memo and almost dropped it in shock.

On page eleven of this mostly meaningless document, there was a full nude picture of Kris standing on the sidewalk... next to an equally nude Odile. They stood with arms over each other's shoulders, both making the peace sign with the other hand. To their right was a number on the brick: 1210. Michael looked back. The same number was near Davit's home gate.

"When did..." He mumbled, looking to Odile, who just smiled. They made it to Michael's car, where Odile wrapped her claws around him, pressed him against the side of the car, feeling his straining erection in his jeans against her mound. They kissed eagerly for a minute before Odile released him and stepped back. She stood at a distance where she could gently bat at Michael's manhood with the very tip of her tail. He stood there and accepted this unbearable teasing for as long as he could before embracing her again.

They piled in his car and drove the shortest distance they could to find something approaching privacy. Michael tipped his seat all the way back, unsure it would ever return to the upright position, and threw Odile down below him.

At long last... nobody would interrupt them this time.

***

Afterwards, Michael did indeed get his seat back up. He dressed himself and leaned uneasily on the steering wheel, mopping sweat from his neck with a crumpled napkin from a coffee shop. Odile was sat in the passenger's seat. She was not sweating, of course, but looked properly exhausted.

Michael pulled his head off the steering wheel, leaving a small horizontal mark across his forehead. He looked at Odile. "You've never done that before, have you?"

"No." Odile confessed, taking deep, relaxing breaths.

"Then... why did you stop trying to eat me when I said I was a virgin?"

Odile looked at him, vertical pupils wide. "I still don't know what that means. I never did. I just hadn't heard anyone else say it before."

"It means I hadn't ever done what we just did." He explained.

"Oh." She said shortly. She stared out at the empty parking lot they'd come to rest in, distant headlights drifting back and forth along the nearby main road. "Well. Having just experienced it, I'd say I wouldn't have wanted to die without doing that at least once."

Weakness found its way into Michael's exhausted voice. "Are you going to eat me now?"

"Probably." Odile chirped. "It's time to eat that second brain of yours. And the first one, too. I'm going to do the full praying mantis."

"It's fine." Michael moaned. "If you want to eat me, that's fine. I'm sure part of me would be with you forever. It's almost romantic."

Odile tapped him with her tail. He turned, and saw her suppressing a huge smile. She grabbed him and kissed him.

"No one will ever hurt you again." She promised.

And they kept kissing.

EPILOGUE: Croc-worth Orange

Michael never dreamed he would own a home. And he still didn't. This was Missy's newest acquisition, but she wasn't ready to leave the comfortable niche she'd dug herself in Salty Peter's Cove of Fun. Officially, Michael was house-sitting for the past three months, an arrangement that could very easily last for years.

He'd found a job as a janitor at an office, working second-shift most of the time. It wasn't glamorous, but... after his time at Salty Peter's, he wanted something where he didn't directly work with the public, even if he scrubbed toilets and refilled tampon dispensers. It was preferable.

Today was Saturday, his day off, and he went out to the backyard and the underground pool. Near it, the addition Missy helped pay for was a custom koi pond... but not for koi.

Odile crawled out of the smaller pond pool and came to rest on the hot concrete. The water danced off her scales into a small puddle under her naked form. She looked up and saw Michael coming by with a cold beer for himself, and her new favorite drink from the city: coffee.

She got to her feet and sat in that most city-folk outdoor sitting arrangement: the plastic deck chair. She blew the top of the coffee as she'd seen Michael do a few times. He sipped his beer, and she gently sipped the hot brew. It filled her stomach with that intense warm feeling without even needing to drink the blood out of a bird's neck.

Maybe these cityfolk had some thing figured out after all. Although with how hard Michael had labored to teach her how to read... Odile really thought she'd be doing it more often. But everything had a screen on it. The TV, the cell-e-phones, the computer... everything was some sort of video device.

Odile finished her coffee and set the mug down on the armrest. "You want to take a swim?"

"I can't right now, honey." Michael said. "The filter's still not working. I need to fix that." He finished about half his beer before standing and approaching the large pump apparatus at the edge of the pool.

Odile left her mug on her chair. "All right. I'm going to go watch some TV." She went inside, Michael watching that tail swing with every step. She could strut around nude, or shrouded in a habit... but that tail never lied. It was hypnotizing. He would follow it anywhere... but there was still a pool to fix.

Michael undid the top of the large pump tank and looked inside. He didn't see anything inside, though... the interior looked lumpy and weird somehow. He closed it. He looked further down the line, decoupling two pipes from one another. He could hear water running through one of them, but not through the next.

As the two pipes separated, something fell lifelessly out of the pipe. A purple tentacle, extending into the main pump system.

"Oh, no." Michael said aloud. "How did this get in here?" He grabbed the tentacle and pulled on it, expecting the rest of the poor dead animal to slither out with little resistance. But the tentacle wouldn't budge. He pulled harder, the tentacle giving enough resistance that he could lean back on his heels and be held up by the force.

Without warning, the tentacle wrapped itself around his arm like a helical staircase. He shouted, pulling harder, as the creature slowly pulled its massive body out of the three-inch diameter pipe.

The trapped thing was white, except for the purple arm. It had disguised itself to look like the inside of the pump cylinder. The camouflage faded to a gross mottled purple and brown. The skin was bumpy and warty like a toad. How he wished it was just a toad.

As it stood to its full height of approximately five-foot-three, it somehow formed a voluptuous hourglass figure. Her arms split in two near the shoulder, if these tentacles could be called 'arms.' Her legs did a similar split, eight limbs in all. Her face was long and devoid of a visible mouth or nose, but two tiny funnels emerged from the side of her elongated head. Her eyes were poised on the side of her head, set into deep protrusions in her face and horizontal pupils.

"You thaved me!" She sputtered, throwing all four "hands" upwards.

"What the fuck is this?!" Michael shouted loud enough that it might come up at the next community meeting.

"Ttthank you!" She slapped all four arms over his body, each sucker kissing his body repeatedly. "I am your humble tthervant! Ooh... you tathste so gooooood..."

"Get off me!" Michael lacked the strength to push her off when she enlisted all eight tentacles, her legs joining the action to slither under his shirt and try to undo his pants. She got his jeans unfastened, and started groping at his groin.

"I'm Octavia, by the way." She made the introduction far too late, in Michael's opinion. He continued to struggle mightily in the confusing amorous grip of this cephalopod.

"Hey!" Called Odile, who had been brought back out of the house by the commotion. She glowered at this competitor to Michael's affections.