Pooped Out

Marcos Vasquez returned to Southwest Plaza. The front gate was broken and open, again. Two hoodlums followed him into the lobby after he keycarded himself in, no doubt heading up to Crackhouse Lane on the 5th floor or Hooker Alley on the 2nd floor. The first year he had lived here was fine, before that evil real estate deal. Now the security was shot, everything was shot. In the lobby, Melvin was standing in a daze, his pants down at his ankles. A half-dozen people were huddled around the stalled elevators, trying to will them into motion. The "courtesy officer" was nowhere in sight. Marcos checked his mailbox, then started climbing the stairs to the 7th floor, his legs groaning in pain and disbelief. He really didn't need this after the biathlon. Why did he do it, anyway? Swimming was his strongest event, and they had cancelled it because there was too much shit in the Potomac. He should have dropped the biathlon. He entered his apartment to find his furniture moved and debris all over the floor--they had put in a new HVAC system. He walked over and turned it on, but it didn't work. He looked at the plywood they had covered up his windows with while working on the balcony. He didn't even have any damn air in here! He grabbed the phone and lay down on his bed to call around for a place to stay....Or maybe he would just kick down that plywood as soon as his legs stopped throbbing....Or maybe he needed to join that tenant association....Why did the Coast Guard keep postponing his transfer out of D.C.? He fell asleep.

Fifty miles up river, the new 99% owner of Southwest Plaza was sitting in his air-conditioned veranda, sipping Jack Daniels, gazing out at the Potomac River from his 50-acre spread. He had made more money in the past five years than in the previous 50. Life was gooooood. He had no idea that screwing people out of their right of first refusal would make him a millionaire a hundred times over. He wished he had found another city government this incompetent and corrupt sooner in his real estate career. Then again, he probably would have been too sissy to do totally bogus boondoggle deals when he had been a younger man. The last few years had sharpened his real estate instincts into steel acquisition claws, razing their way through D.C. Every day he walked out and smelled that moist river breeze, it fired him up all over again. On Monday, he would telephone Prince and Prowling about the next parcel of D.C. land slated for the Big Land Grab. Outside the veranda window, a duck was staring at him. He went inside to get his shotgun.

Back in D.C., Dubious McGinty finished cleaning his new shotgun and stored it carefully in the bridgeman's office abandoned control room. Quick inventory check--hmmm, up to 42 guns. Forty-two weapons thrown away after they had killed somebody, he reckoned. No use turning them over to the police--better to take them off the streets himself, and save them for that showdown that was coming with that demon in the Potomac. He closed and locked the abandoned control room, then put the key in rotational hiding place number 4. He returned to the bridgeman's office to eat his scrounged-up supper. After supper, he walked out to the catwalk, squatted over the river, and took a crap at the bitch witch in the river. He knew it couldn't hurt her, but he liked doing it anyway. He had really enjoyed raiding those tourist port-a-potties to dump hundreds of pounds of poop into the river Thursday night, guaranteeing fecal contamination levels high enough to prevent the triathletes from swimming in the river. He had probably saved a hundred lives, which made him feel pretty good, but mostly he felt good about stinking it up for that demon. Little did he know that her appetite was only growing stronger.

Across town, Golden Fawn fell asleep thinking about the white buffalo birth earlier in the week, and the ceremonies she had missed with her family out on the reservation. Before the night was over, she would have another nightmare about Ardua and her insatiable hunger, but for the first time, the pink warblers would come, and she would wake up with hope.