Chapter One
Because Bruno Brandt designed big city power grids, he thought he knew everything about electricity, but the current that jolted through him when he saw the woman in Boondocks made him feel like Frankenstein being hit by lightning. It was 2:00 a.m. and he hadn’t slept his usual four hours the previous night. He’d red-eyed from the west coast, then flown himself from Raleigh-Durham in his helicopter, landing down the road at his cottage in Blackwater Inlet. Back-water Inlet, locals called it. He hoped it didn’t start snowing this far south, the way they kept predicting, because it would ruin his travel schedule, and he wanted to make his upcoming meetings in Chicago. So much for global warming. Plowing to the bar, he yelled for another drink since the first hadn’t done jack to warm him.
Not so the dental hygienist. She was hotter than live wires. Well...tonight she was a DJ, not a hygienist, go figure. She had the sexiest voice he’d ever heard. Star quality. Leaning on the bar, he knocked back a second drink, letting the couple next to him do the small talk. That was the cool thing about small towns, everybody was so damn friendly. In one night, he could meet more people in Blackwater Inlet than he’d met in D.C. in a lifetime. Robby Shoemaker and his wife, Alice, were not shoemakers by trade, as it had turned out, but owned the only shrink practice in town.
Not that Bruno liked being psychoanalyzed. Alice had started the convo guessing he wasn’t married and pointing at his naked ring finger, making him feel like he was on a date with one of the gym-bodied climber-types he knew in D.C. When she’d guessed he’d experienced some sort of loss, she’d hit too close to home. He’d started to leave but the drink hadn’t made him any sleepier yet. He was cursed by many things, including the ability to hold his liquor.
Besides, every time he heard the voice of the DJ, a warm hand grabbed him by the balls and squeezed. Lots of females had whispered dirty somethings to him, but oh, the things he wanted to hear this one say. Even dumb things like, “Oh, Bruno,” where the words alone might sound boring, but the intonation would make it steamy. The voice was strangely familiar, too. He could swear he’d heard it before, but he couldn’t have, because they’d never met. It was deep, but not so throaty that she sounded like Marlene Dietrich chain smoking too much weed.
He studied her half-unbuttoned gauzy white blouse. Nice tits. A little drink dribble on the front sent a certain devil-may-care message, and he heard her say into the microphone, “Come do me, baby.” What she really said was, “At Boondocks, the music never stops.” In D.C., cops would be breaking up the party, but in Blackwater Inlet nobody gave a rat’s ass if the crowd was still slurping daiquiris at sunup.
“Next song up is ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,’” she continued. Already, Bruno had drunk through “Christmas Tree on Fire” and “I Want an Alien for Christmas,” and since he had plenty of reasons to be glad this particular Christmas was over, the hygienist-cum-DJ was hitting all the right irreverent notes. Everybody was laughing and dancing and shrieking inane shit over the music, detoxing from the holiday just like him. He yelled, “Scotch rocks,” then traced a circle above Robby and Alice’s glasses, buying a round for which they thanked him. The polished wood of the bar reflected his gesture. Like the glitter ball and jukebox, the bar had either been here forever, or was reclaimed from elsewhere, not that Bruno was going to worry himself over which.
He just wanted to unwind after the long meeting day in which his employer, the federal government, had brought in a motivational speaker who’d kept assuring everybody there was no i in team. Everybody already knew Bruno didn’t do team. He’d mind the monkey suit a lot less, too, if the hygienist-cum-DJ assisted him in the suit removal segment of his evening. Well, morning.
She was doing slutty with a touch of class, Bruno’s favorite thing, and he was miles from D.C. It felt like forever since he’d slept with somebody outside his social network, someone totally new. Strawberry-red hair whipped around the woman’s face like escaped electrical wires, and in back, the wild upswept hairdo was held together with something sharp and pointy, knitting needles or chopsticks or something. The dim light was hiding everybody’s flaws, and he couldn’t see unless she was under the glitter ball that hung above the dance floor like a prehistoric artifact. It reminded him of last night, when he’d been channel surfing in the Marriott. He’d seen a spaceship that looked just like the glitter ball on the History Channel, in one of their programs about aliens. That was the downside of globalism. Living out of hotels. He liked the minibars, though.