No Rest 4 Wicked Botniks Chapter 21
Mary Okinawa #3: The Lady in the Red Kimono
CHAPTER 21
Mary Okinawa #3:
The Lady in the Red Kimono
Dwight “The Night” Thompson, the biggest black porn star in the Biz, had been Mary’s man for three years. Mary hadn’t slept with anybody else on-screen or off in that time. But then poor Dwight died mysteriously a week ago in some drug deal gone wrong, right in the middle of Murray Avenue.
She hadn’t known Dwight was taking bloos and a bit of sheen, and not from Pharma-Corp or OTC or E-Z Counter, but the high-dollar, dangerous, illegal doses off of the street. Those were the doses that got laced with other more potent drugs. And God alone knew what they cut it all with to make a profit.
Larry and his Yakuza bosses swore the whole thing had been some insane Russian job, a Bratva encroachment on Panasian turf, against some small-time Triad or one of the Five Clans. She didn’t know enough to say otherwise, but something just didn’t add up. She knew she was only getting half of the story.
Sometimes Mary privately feared Dwight had been going to see another woman. Maybe he had met someone from another studio, like Scarlet or Gypsy or Jenny. Maybe he had found a more innocent woman outside the Biz, a waitress, a coffee girl, or… or, someone, somebody, but…
She knew that wasn’t like him. Dwight wasn’t a cheater. And she thought she had made him happy. They had both been happy once…
She dipped her face beneath the water, and her deep brunette hair rippled and pooled around her. She imagined drowning, for the third time that week. It was becoming a fascinating image, not just macabre, but possibly… appealing?
She could see the headlines, photographs, and videos that would be put out by Mega-West Media and Tokyo News and the Local NV City News Network (NVC-NN). She stayed under until her lungs hurt. Then she rose and gasped for breath.
It was time to get out of this hot mess of a thing. The sofa-pool definitely wasn’t relaxing anymore. “C’est la vie,” she whispered, and giggled once more. “Che sarà sarà saraaaah.”
A head shake. I’m going stir-crazy in here!
Time to get out and about. Time to prepare her weapons.
Mary finally clambered out and drained the water. She toweled herself thoroughly and threw on a bright red kimono. She tried watching TV, but there was nothing on right now except soaps and romances from Korea.
Eye roll! She wanted to see an action movie, a war flick or a spy flick, or a fight-the-terrorists something-or-other. Just something with blood and guts and a bonafide badass, a real hero. She wanted a Western starring Raymond Kajino, or a Bobby Schneider vehicle, or anything by Terrence Cohen or Tully Greenfield or Paolo Aquino. She loved drama, of course, but she wanted to watch a hot sweaty man shed bad guy blood to save a woman in distress. That’s what a real man was, after all.
She left the TV for now. She walked over toward the balcony, but she did not press her hand to the glass fingerprint-reader to open the sliding doors. She stared out the windows to the busy Envy skyline, to the neon signs and holo-play ads that fought for dominance above and below the clouds. She saw Sugoi Cola and Spicy-Co commercials, and a billboard for something called the Cobalt Security Company. What the hell was that?
She sighed for what felt like the twelfth or thirteenth or thirtieth time that night. This room was just too big for one person. Without Dwight to share it, she felt more lonely up here and now than she had at nineteen, when she first came to the city alone to start her dirty little career.
A call was coming over the TV. Larry again.
Mary sighed and clicked the remote to receive it. He was sweating bullets, which meant he’d been drinking again, maybe in the company of the Yaks.
“Hey, Baby!” were the first words out of his mouth.
She crossed her arms. “Don’t you ‘Baby’ me, Larry! I’m not a cartoon character. You’re talking to me, not Lil’ Miss Bea-Bea.”
“Calm down, Mary! It’s just a turn of phrase.”
“I’m not Mary to you either. You’re not Dwight. You’re not my boyfriend. You can call me Miss Okinawa or nothing at all.”
“Alright, fine. I’m sorry! Don’t be so sensitive. Now, Miss Okinawa, I have a new job opportunity for—”
“A new one, or the same one?”
“The Sugoi Cola and Wasabi Shake executives are throwing an exclusive party tonight on the top floor to celebrate a great quarter, and—”
“How many times do I have to say no for you to hear it? No means no, Larry.”
“So you can call me Larry but I can’t call you by your first name?”
She pointed an accusatory finger at her television. “Exactly. Because I make money, and you just make money off of me. My first name is Maria, by the way.”
“Ouch,” said Larry. “You know, you’re not performing in movies these days, Miss ‘Okinawa,’ because you won’t screw anybody but your better half, so you're really not pulling in much dough. I.. Sorry, let me start over. I’m sorry. Truly.”
Larry cleared his throat and proceeded with his pitch. “If you were to just show up and make an appearance at one of these parties, well, it could be very lucrative, for you and me both.”
Maria draped herself provocatively on the couch and shot her agent a sideways look. “What do you mean, just show up? What or whom would I have to do?”
Larry wiped away some of the sweat still laying across his brow. “You wouldn’t have to do anybody, Miss Okinawa. Your dirty imagination is running away with you, like always. Y’know, just mingle, laugh at bad jokes, smoke cigarettes, pour some drinks, and go home. And it goes without saying, wear something pretty.”
Mary rolled her eyes. “Of course it does. And the pretty dress I’m supposed to wear… is it for the executives, or the yakuza?”
Larry coughed nervously. “Well, what difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference to me, Larry. The executives are handsy enough as it is. The yakuza boys think they own this whole town and everyone in it.”
Larry scratched his round and stubbled cheek and cleared his throat again. “As far as Downtown goes, they do,” he whispered slowly, almost inaudibly, and it seemed like genuine sorrow lay in his voice and face.
Maria rose from the couch and slipped some more leg and thigh out of the kimono. “I understand,” she responded. “But here’s the deal.”
“What deal?” Trepidation and fear crept into the cowardly agent’s voice and manner.
Mary made herself half naked by degrees, showing her full, fake breasts.
“You’ve seen all of me, right, Larry? Every square inch of my fine real estate?”
Larry suppressed a cackle, and then hacked yet another cough. “What are you getting at, Miss Okinawa?”
“It seems like every pervert on planet Earth has seen my goods in action. But you know what they can’t do? You know what you and the Yaks and the Coke bosses and every dick named Rick can’t do? TOUCH IT.”
She turned off the conversation with a click.
Mary ignored Larry’s next call, and the call after that. She was already gathering her supplies. She sent him a curt reply with her palm-vice. She’d go to the party for her own reasons and on her own terms and at her own pace, but for right now, she was enjoying the illusion of the moral high ground way too much.
She heard the party starting long before she ever thought of going upstairs. Such were the perks of living just below the upper crust. Not much longer now...
She gave herself another hour to mope, and then she put on her war paint: blush, mascara, eyeliner, lipstick, the works.
She chose something red and slinky to wrap around herself, tightly. Another fresh red kimono.
And then she got her actual weapons, the vibrio-blade wakizachi and the micron-sharpened katana. She had flirted once with the props department head of a particularly daring porno by Danny Schultz, and now she could pretend the blades and sheaths were still props. The Yakuza and the executives would find it all cute, not a threat. Oh, look! The pornstar hooker is play-acting as a female samurai.
She could already hear the giggles. She smiled in anticipation. The Yaks wouldn’t know what hit them. They’d be drunk, and she’d be sober for her mission.
Mary wasn’t going to play their part, but she could dress it. She wanted information; she wanted to know the truth about Dwight and what happened a week ago. She wanted out of the Biz, and she would get her escape one way or another. They thought they were going to take everything from her, but she wouldn’t budge. She wasn’t going to give them an inch.
She would take them for everything they had, everything they were worth.
Maria Hoshizaki Venezzi knew how to make men weak, and she had a mission tonight. No woman should be bound by class and cash and be told how and when to bow, much less how and when to serve “coffee, tea, or me.” No one should be made to cater to every male need under the sun. With Dwight dead and gone, she was no man’s geisha.
END OF CHAPTER 21
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