Mangled Meat by Edward Lee Page B

really hurt! Please, gimme one for tonight, too. Please. ”
    “Jesus, Jinny, you’re gonna turn into a junkie like Ann and Therese.”
    “I can barely even walk. Oscar was hitting me so hard it felt like a sledgehammer.”
    “You girls take too much of this shit...”
    Oxy, Flood thought. Oxycodone, a morphine derivative and the number one prescription drug of abuse.
    “Ann’s supposed to meet me here for dinner,” Leon remarked. “Didn’t see her at all last night. Did you?”
    “Yeah, but just for a minute.”
    “How’d she do?”
    “Said she did one-hour tricks all day, then bagged an all-nighter with some rich guy from Maryland. And she said she needs more oxyies.”
    “I already gave her enough. You girls gotta watch it with that shit, I been telling you. Now come on. Let’s go to the bar and get some lunch, then you can wait for Oscar. You feeling better now?”
    “Yes. Thank you.”
    The door clattered open. Flood faked dialing the phone; in the corner of an eye he saw Leon and Jinny leave the anteroom, none the wiser of his presence.
    Very, very interesting, he thought. A day in the life of a pimp and prostitute. Flood dialed for real, found no messages in wait, then left.
    Now he got to thinking. How many of the beautiful women here were really call-girls? Everywhere he looked, they sat, walked, or waited. Why should I care? he asked himself. Whether they’re hookers or not, I can’t do anything with them anyway. He kept mental blinders on walking through the resort’s pool area, ignoring side-glimpses of more, more, more drop-dead-gorgeous women in the sparsest bikinis, all sprawled out on lounge chairs like things on deliberate display. You’d think I’d be used to this by now, cauterized. When did learned behavior sink into the psyche permanently? After three years? Flood wished it were so, wished that all desire would just die.
    The hotel’s beach bar was just as bad, preeminent breasts maximized by so many women sitting at tables, leaning over fruity drinks. The bar was sufficient but too busy. Flood wanted to find a remote place, where he could think...
    He embarked to the beach, clunky Seattle sandals sinking in sugar-white sand. The nearly wave-free Gulf of Mexico looked more like a vast and very tranquil lagoon. This is better... Tone down, relax. Get your mind off things.... Like—
    Last night...
    What had come over him? He’d chosen a sexual self-indulgence over a typical civic duty, as if his orgasm was more important than a woman being beaten. Get off it! he suddenly yelped at himself.
    Oh, no, he thought next.
    The mental blinders weren’t working out here. Lines of them: women with faces and bodies worthy of swimwear calendars. God in heaven! Stop!
    The woman seemed to drift rather than walk down the beach; it seemed as though she were an entity coming out of the sun. Flood’s heart shimmied even at the initial distance, eyes blooming at this virtual paragon bereft of defect. Waist-length hair the color of the same sun-lit sand she walked on danced in the faint breeze coming off the Gulf. Zero body fat but every contour full, even exploited for the visual effect. Breasts the size and undoubted firmness of fresh grapefruits. A harder cardiac shimmy when he noted in detail her apparel: a white fishnet bikini, each “box” of which was one inch square, and through these boxes everything was flaunted. Beer-can-top-sized areolae, darkly puckered, and nipple-ends sticking out as hard and crisply delineated as bullet cartridges: perfect cylinders of pink flesh. His gaze trembled to the pubic region, where the large fishnet squares made no secret of the fact that she dealt with an expert electrolysist, the vaginal furrow and mystical folds simply right there, for all to see, burgeoning against the threads.
    God’s really kicking my ass today—showing me THIS, Flood thought. His groin seemed to cringe. The woman appeared to be in a hurry, looking over her shoulder. Flood just stood