Lourdes of Loki 11 - Some assholes come along

"Paolo Meparo," Gaetania giggled as she poured coffee for me. Honestly, I thought that guy looked like a Ken Doll!"
"But I can promise you he had his things all in order!" I replied as I leant back against the pillar. "You're right that he might look a bit too clean cut, but he has his reasons."
"Like trying to attract an audience of 13 years olds, right?!"
"Well, sort of."
"I've never really understood that with boy band, the music coming second hand. After a bunch of kawaii muchachos."
"Well, there's money to be made in that business, so it ought to be clear as crystal to you, my dear She Scrooge, why people keep doing it."

"You have a valid point, Lou! So how about today? There's this beach volley tournament not far from here..." she picked up a flyer from our kitchen counter, waving it in front of me. "...and I'm ready to bet my grandma's antic pearl earrings that the place will be jam packed with gorgeous hunks with abs you could crack nuts upon."
"Well, I'm not holding anything against, so let's go down there. And then I guess I'm going to develop a craving for fat food today as well, since I have a slight hangover, so if we could go to one of those steak houses and have spare rips and French fries, I'd be delighted."
"Deal! I'm gonna hit the shower and then let's be off."
"Good, 'coz I need to make a few phone calls first."

***

Two hours later Gaetania and I found usselves down at the beach, and sure, there were so many gorgeous men you didn't know where to start ogling. There were abs and abs on sunburnt bodies, bleached hairs on the Caucasian guys, bumping dreads on the black guys and cuts with shaven sides on the Asian ones. In general that was. And then there were so many women staring at then as well. (And quite a few gay men too naturally). So Gaetania busied usselves with looking and looking and looking, and no matter that you don't understand shit about the rules of the game called beach wolleyball, it was the dudes that mattered. I wanted to kidnap them all and drag them to my cage and hump them one by one.  

After a while, there was someone calling my name, and as I turned I spotted Ezmeralda (Ezra among friends) from the party yesterday, so we made it over to where she was sitting together with two guys. One was a faintly familiar black guy with Egyptian signs tattooed all over him and a red tank top with Yoda's big eared mug printed upon it. He introduced himself as Valdo and turned out to be Ezra's boyfriend. The second guy was Caucasian in a very English way with carrot coloured hair and more freckles than there are wannabes in Beverly Hills. He was called Sean, and he had an accent Scottish enough for me to not mention England but ask about UK instead.

We were welcomed to sit down with them and Sean was offering cider (non-alcoholic, since he was driving) and in turn we let them sample of the strawberries and nut mix we had brought our way down to the beach, and we chatted and had a nice time in general – until those assholes came along.

Yes, it was my 'good old friend' skinny Latex, also from the party yesterday. And she had a few friends with her, some kind of guys who looked like the bar brawling kind in studded leather and shaven heads. And Latex started to give Ezra the lip over something and when Valdo told her politely to leave he was threatened by one of those thugs. It was then I remembered that Latex was actually called Vivek, but since she was wearing latex today again (I mean on the beach – hello!) I decided to let her live in my mind with that nickname attached to her. Valdo stood up and Sean was also rising while Ezra told them not to. But they were having nothing of it, it was the testosterone thing again. Men!

But I was not going to let my new found pals Valdo and Sean get beaten to pulp, no matter that they both were big and fit, Latex' pals were five. And five against two is always a disadvantage, if someone doesn't carry a fire arm or something. Or that little Gizmo dad had given to me, which I always kept with me, just in case. Thus I also stood up and first I tried the diplomatic way.

"Vivek, please," I asked of the emaciated woman. "Please, leave with your friends. We came down for a nice Sunday on the beach, watching the ball games, we don't want any trouble."
"Who are you and why do you care?" Latex  snarled back. "Some new fat friend of Ezra, huh?"
"Listen, I do not want any fight to occur here. In case you haven't noticed there are quite a few policemen around, and if we don't want to end our Sunday in custody, I suggest we chill down a bit."
"You suggest, and why should I care?"
"I just said that," I was beginning to get pissed. "There are cops around. What's wrong with your attention span?"
"It doesn't pay attention to fat pussies like you!"

That was it, I had had it with this idiot and her posse.
"I don't know what your problem is really, but someone should have told you that not eating is bad for the brain cells and it's apparently empirically proven in your case. So I am going to talk slowly to you and you might get the message. We. Do. Not. Want. You. And. Your. Gay. Friends. Around. So Split!" then I grabbed her by the arm and turned her around and placed a sneaker firmly in her rear end, giving her a kick so she stumbled forward in the sand, dropping her Luis Viton bag so all kind of junk fell out all over the place. Naturally one of her 'bodyguards' took one step closer to me, grabbing me by the arm, while I saw Sean trying to get in the way and heard both Ezra and Gaetania telling me to stop. But I was so not in the mood. This fag was going to get Loki'd and get it bad.

Reaching out with my left hand, the Gizmo placed firmly in my palm I slammed it hard into him, and the next time he found himself 30 feet from the rest of us, or more exactly out in the water, among all those swimmers and surfers. When the rest of the thugs had seen their friend skid across the sand like a twister and then land down in the water, they proved too much of cowards to hang around, instead they turned around and ran for their lives.

"Now what the hell was that?" Sean asked, expressing what everyone else was wondering.
"A girl's best friend in bad neighborhoods," I replied. "Actually a shocking device. Bought it in Japan." The last thing was made up, but who cares?
"I bet it's illegal," Valdo commented. "However I didn't see a thing."
"Neither did I," Ezra added as Latex had finished collecting her stuff from the ground and was standing up.
"You bitch, you broke my arm." She made a face at me.
"Oooooh... " I replied. "You know, that wouldn't have happened if you had headed my warning and just walked out of here."

At those words, Latex pointed her finger at me, while snarling:
"I'm gonna make you pay for this, you hear me blond! You're gonna bleed so bad when I'm finished with you."  
"Not by those thugs you had with you, I assume," I replied, "because I bet they are still running as we speak."
"Just you wait, just you wait," the broad kept on waving her finger for a few seconds more before she changed to another finger and then turned on her heal and stalked away, zig zagging among the crowds on the beach.

"Now what was that about really?" Gaetania asked as soon as Latex was without ear's reach. "I mean, why did that broad and her friends show up in the first place?"
"Old shit between her and me," Sean said. "We used to be together. And to cut a long story short it was one of the biggest mistakes of my life."
"Huh, and she can't let go?" Gaetania faced Sean.
"No, she believes I owe her, and she had probably tried to convince her 'friends' that I was in need of a spanking-up. And not of the erotic kind, mind you. So thanks Lourdes, whatever it was you did to that guy."
"I've already forgot she did something," Valdo added.
"Save for sneezed at Vivek so she was blown off her feet of course," Ezra grinned.

"But a word of warning," Sean went on. "You have got yourself a badass enemy here, now this bitch won't rest her case until she has destroyed your life, she has done it before after all. I've seen it. A girl named Felicia. And then there's Lucia..."
"I think she's getting the picture, Sean," Ezra cut off. "I'd suggest you keep your eyes open for whatever this woman can get on her mind. If she comes around your place or something, starts threatening you – record it, I suggest and then make sure to go to the cop. They already know this lady is trouble, so they might be able to keep an eye upon her. Problem is they can't bust her because she's rich and have access to some of the slickest lawyers around."

"Hmm..." Gaetania said. "Well, Lourdes and I aren't exactly resource less either, I guarantee you, Ezra. But thanks a lot for the warning anyway!" I knew exactly what my Italian friend was hinting at. Her mob connections. But I said nothing, made sure to change the subject instead, since I was more than fine with not talking about this stuff anymore. Instead we had returned our attention to the beach volley games and then we had talked about our backgrounds Sean was really Scottish, he even had his own tartan and a Mac-name (and I don't mean Apple computers) but he didn't know how to play the bag pipe, thanks for small mercies.

Ezra was in the movie business, doing special make up, like making people old or looking like they had been beaten up, infected with creepy diseases and so on, and finally Valdo had been in some films, minor roles as the bad guy's thug, a side kick cop and the likes. It was that way Ezra and Valdo had met, she had applied make-up upon his handsome face to make it less handsome when he had been playing a radiation damaged badass in a Sci-Fi movie.

In turn they had learned what we were doing. And we had to answer a few questions naturally, but it had all been very good natured and nice and in the end we had gone out for dinner by the beach and then gone our separate  ways after exchanging phone numbers and mail addresses, the unpleasant moment at the beach more or less forgotten. But as we closed our front door behind us that night, Gaetania almost wrestled me against the white-bricked wall.
"Lou, you're in deep shit! That girl is known about town. She'll not rest her case until she has set you up."
"For kicking her ass? Well, she sure deserved..."

"I agree, someone should've done that with her when she was like five years old. But no matter that I consider her worth less than an amoeba in the sewers, she'll mean trouble to us. I'm quite sure of that."
"So what do you suggest."
"We hire a body guard. To start with. Someone who can check on us and on the clinic as well."
"And how do we find one of those?" I asked, very reluctant to drag in Loki in this, although I knew that he would have a solution to our little problem.
"I can fix somebody, trust me," Gaetania promised as she let go of me and I straightened up the collars of my jacket. "I'll make some phone calls, Vittorio knows some relentless guys."
"Thanks, Gae!"
"No prob' my ass is in the fire line as well. Just because I sat where I sat today."
  
***

There was a message from the private investigator I had hired on my answering machine. He had failed to locate my mother Destiny with whatever surname. And he told me he was abandoning the case, and that I didn't owe him any money save for the initial fee I had already paid.

Damn!

Now what about my mother? Could she be – like dead? I felt tears form in my eyes as I hit repeat and listened to the message all over again, while looking at the bleached photo of my parents from back in the 80ies.

***

"I'll send you Maurice and Jean-Paul..."
"No, dad please!" I didn't want any frost monsters turned into harbour thugs from Marseilles to babysit me. "If I need a bodyguard, I'll fix one on my own. After all I can pay for it these days!"
"It's harder than you think, finding good people out there!" Dad's worry were heard all the way from France and I made a face.
"Don't you think I know it. However Maurice and Jean-Paul are not human, and that's enough for me. I can accepting you helping me and Gaetania with a flat and with some connections, but I don't want supernatural beings watching over me. So let me fix this, will you."
"Cupcake, it's not easy finding good people..."
"Daaaaad!"
"Lourdes, if you can find an adequate body guard on your own within a month, then I promise to wear that ridiculous Hello Kitty cardigan!"
"Deal!"