Love Bites by Adrienne Barbeau Page B

their necks. Waiting for me. What the hell was going on? Well, I wasn’t going to give them any more photo ops, whatever they wanted them for. The Mercedes had tinted windows. They wouldn’t even know I was in the car. I stretched out in the backseat and let Sveta drive through, parting them like Moses at the Red Sea. As the gate closed behind us, I turned to watch them. They were eerily silent, staring at the car.
    Maral was waiting outside the front door, anxiety on her face. She’d gone back to her natural hair color the day before she’d left for Louisiana. The red looked gorgeous on her, but it was stringy and unwashed, and there was a peculiar smell coming off her, as if she’d brushed up against something briny. I wondered if the paps had gotten any shots of her. She wouldn’t like it if she showed up on TMZ under “Celebrity Hair.” Not looking like that, at least.
    “What’s wrong with you? You look like shit,” I said. Two days at home with her family in the bayou and she was a mess.
    “I have to talk to you. Before you go in the house. I’ve got someone in there, and I’ve got to explain.” Her voice was brittle with tension. She stepped in front of me to block me from entering. Normally I would have taken her in my arms to calm her down, but the smell wafting off her made me keep my distance. It was someone’s body odor, not hers, and it had settled on her like skunk spray. It was foul.
    “What the hell is going on, Maral?” I said. “What’s that odor? Who’s in the house?”
    “It’s my brother’s friend. But he’s not in the house, he’s in the guesthouse. That’s what I have to talk to you about. I had to get him away from Jamie. I had to bring him back with me from my momma’s. I know I smell, I sat next to him on the plane. We just got here and I haven’t had time to take a shower. But I don’t trust him enough to leave him alone anyway, so I was waiting for you to come home.”
    “All right. All right. Settle down. You’d better tell me what you’ve got to tell me fast because I have a date and I’ve got to get ready. I’m leaving here at 7:30.”
    “A date? With who?”
    Like quicksilver, accusation replaced the nervousness in her voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it. “Never mind,” I said slowly. “Just tell me who the fuck this guy is, and why have you got him in my house?” I drew out every word deliberately.
    “He’s that dealer, Ovsanna. He was selling drugs to Jamie, and I couldn’t get Jamie away from him. Jamie thinks they’re best friends. I didn’t know what to do. I just want to get rid of him. Jamie told him I work for ‘that scary lady in the movies,’ and he thinks you’re Mary Tyler Moore. He thinks you can introduce him to Ashley Judd. He wants to do a commercial for zit medicine so he can make a lot of money and get his face cleared up. It’s absolutely gross, covered in pussy pimples. I told him you’d put him in the movies if he came with me, and he believed me.”
    “You told him what?”
    “He thinks he’s going to meet Jack Bauer. Like 24 is real.”
    “Maral, are you nuts?”
    “Well, I tried to pay him to leave Jamie alone, and he said, sure, he’d take my money, and as soon as I left, he’d get the retard to pay him again. That’s what he called Jamie—a retard—and I wanted to kill him. I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I just wanted to get him here; I thought if I could get him here, maybe you could—”
    “What? I could what?” I was getting pissed. “What were you thinking, bringing a drug dealer into my house?! Get him out of here!”
    “Don’t yell at me, Ovsanna, please.” She clenched her hands in front of her as though she were praying. “You offered to help. You said if there was anything you could do . . . well . . . I thought you could—do what you do. Get rid of him somehow. Like you got rid of those beings in Palm Springs.”
    “Oh, damn it, Maral. You’ve been around me ten