I have had a Road to Damascus epiphany. I actually write better when I'm trying to write badly. At least, that's my opinion.
Here's a story I wrote badly to see if it would actually turn out good.
Let me know what you think.
*****
On the planet Hun Wat, everything was dirty. The air was dirty, the rivers were dirty, the streets were covered with filth and garbage. Even the cops were dirty. Especially the cops.
My name is Brown. Tom Brown. I was once a cop, served 15 years, and tried to stay clean. It wasn’t easy, and for my efforts I was framed for a crime I didn’t commit. The big boys upstairs weren’t happy with me because I didn’t have my hand in the cookie jar. So they set me up. I stumbled on the body of a 10-year-old girl who had been tortured with pliers, raped with a flashlight, and stabbed 30 times with a penknife. My DNA was all over the scene -- on the pliers, on the flashlight, on the penknife, and in the girl.
The Commisioner offered me a deal. My badge, my silence, and the charges would be dropped. He even threw in a good severence package to sweeten the deal. I was looking to my future so I asked for more. I would set up shop as a private dick and he would ease the paperwork through the bureaucracy. We struck a deal, and drunk Altairian whiskey. After I finished my drink, I flattened the Commissioner with a right cross to the jaw. He took it, without complaint. I think he was even glad I hit him – eased his conscience a bit. He told the cops who grabbed me to let me go. I walked out the door and out of police work forever.
That was three years ago. I have an office now, ten blocks from the starport, on the side of town respectable people avoid. Business was bad. I got a reputation as an honest PI, so the wealthiest and best connected clients avoided me. My compensance was that people who were poor and down on their luck trusted me. But working for the poor means you’re poor too. It would take an entire month’s wages for these people to pay me for a job that lasted two days. The economics wasn’t working out and I was pondering alternative employment.
I was doing nothing in particular, looking out the dirt streaked window of my dusty, dingy office one hot, steamy afternoon, because all afternoons on Hun Wat are hot and steamy, whe she walked in. To say she was a knock-out would not give her justice. She was an unbroken series of knock-outs by an undefeated champion of the heavyweight division who was hopped up on military grade combat pharmaceuticals, which was illegal on Hun Wat, but the cops didn’t care so long as they were paid off to look the other way.
I felt the stirrings of something between my legs that I hadn’t felt since my sexy ex-wife left me for a young, handsome and wealthy shareholder of the ComStock Corporation, the most powerful corporation on Hun Wat, and hence the real power on a world where the government’s only function was taking bribes and shaking down people who didn’t have the connections to fight back.
Let me start with her legs, because that’s what first caught my attention. They were like pile drivers enveloped with luscious flesh, poised precariously on top of stiletto heels that could easily kill a man if they were used as weapons against his forehead. As she walked towards me across the room, her heels drove deep impressions into the plexi-concrete floor, making me feel sorry for any cockroaches who might be under her feet. Her hips swayed like a pendulum swung by hypnotist, and I almost fell under her spell, and only my hard-boiled distrust of my fellow human beings saved me. Her breasts were generous handfuls of tropical fruit, like the ones Hun Wat imports from the agg planets, and I ached to reach out and touch them. But her lips were the best, so I saved them for last as I lustfully checked out her form. They were luscious, wet, inviting, and slightly lopsided in a cynical half-grin. Her eyes were amused, and indeed she was amused, for she knew her power over men, and she intended to use that power on me. So it took all my grit and willpower to lean back in my chair, kick my feet up casually on my desk, light up a cigarette and snarl, “You don’t impress me lady, I just threw my girlfriend out of my apartment because she bored me, and she had twice your looks and a rich daddy who paid me just to keep his daughter amused.”
The woman sat down on one of the chairs I keep for clients and her smile grew even wider as she flashed me brilliant teeth that looked like pearls, like the ones they have on Earth, though I’ve never actually seen one myself, “I’m not here to seduce you Mr. Brown, can I call you Tom?”
“No you may not.”
“I’m not here to seduce you Tom, I’m here to give you a job,” she said, pulling out a stick of lipstick and moistening her lips with a ruby red color that made me think of sex. “I’m about to be arrested for a murder I didn’t commit, and I want you to prove I’m innocent.”
“Innocence doesn’t mean much on this planet, lady,” I commented dryly, taking another draw of sweet tobacco smoke from my cigarette. “You know my name, what's yours?”
“Bell,” she answered, making it sound like an invitation to bed. “Cassandra Bell. I was named after the woman in Greek mythology who had the gift of prophesy, and the curse that no one ever believed what she said.”
“Any relation to the Bells of Bell Hall?” I asked.
“Bill Bell, CFO of ComStock is my husband,” she responded.
I whistled long and low, the kind of whistle you make when you’re really impressed. The Bells were of the elite class of executives that held the real power in Hun Wat. As a top executive in the most powerful corporation on the planet, Bill Bell was really, really, really powerful.
“Actually, Bill was my husband. He’s dead now. He’s the man I will be accused of murdering. But I’m innocent. Someone knocked me out from behind while I was combing my hair in my bedroom. When I came to, I was standing over the bed with a bloody knife in my hand, and my husband was a corpse in blood-stained sheets with matching stab wounds.”
“I don’t want to get mixed up in this,” I said, getting up to escort Mrs. Bell out the door and out of my life. “I had similar problems myself and don’t want to relive the experience. Too many powerful players. Too many chances of me ending up as a bullet-riddled corpse thrown in the fuel tank of a merchant cruiser headed outbound to a distant colony world on the edge of space.”
“Mr. Brown, I can pay you,” she said, her hard veneer of sexy detachment breaking for the first time.
I grabbed her arm and pushed her towards the door, “Good luck, Mrs. Brown, and get out.”
“I can pay you a lot,” she said, reaching into her purse. The cop in me reacted to her sudden hand motion and I knocked the purse out of her hand with one hand, and pinned her to the wall with the other.
We were pressed against each other, chest to chest, leg to leg, her lips just inches from mine. Her breath smelled like apricots, that delicious fruit they grow on Earth, that mutated into something far more sinister when they planted it in the poison soil of Xerxes V. It was a smell that could mean wholesome nutrition, and it was a smell that could mean lingering pain and death. Who could tell with Cassandra? All I knew is she was probably a murderer. And then suddenly, I didn’t care. I pressed my lips against hers and our bodies melted into one flesh, and the world fell away into a whirling sensation of passion and desire. We made love on the floor right then and there.
That was the moment I lost everything I had, which wasn’t much but valuable to me – my integrity, my code of ethics, my sense of right and wrong. I would do anything for her. Anything. I didn’t know it then, but I was a dead man.
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