Kate Allen - Alison Kaine Mystery 4 - Just a Little Lie Page 2

  The femme was saying, "Don't you blame me! If you'd been taking care of me the way our contract agreed you were going to take care of me, I wouldn't have had to look somewhere else! Why the hell was I there alone anyway? I'm not going to stay locked up in my room the rest of my life because you might see me at the store!"

  The butch Pat turned savagely in her seat. "Get over it! You didn't get what you wanted for the first time in your whole life! It was bound to happen sometime—it was better that it happened now than when you're sixty! You might have died of shock! At least now you can get a lot of professional help and maybe get a life! Or if you don't want to do that, there's probably a whole lot of sick puppies this weekend you can lie to and manipulate!"

  "Lie! Lie!? Okay, let's talk about lying! Let's talk about contract violation! Do you think anybody's going to play with you this weekend? I don't think so! Not when I tell everybody how you trashed our contract! Not if I have to stand right next to you and tell every woman who smiles in your direction! Not if—"

  "Knock it off!" Alison spoke in her sternest voice. There wasn't a whole lot more she could do. Rattled at the tollbooth, she'd accidentally entered the middle lane of I-70 and her chances of cutting to the breakdown lane within the next couple of minutes were slim. She was going to have to work her way over as carefully as if she were playing Frogger.

  "You fucking, lying bitch!"

  Alison's stern tone might as well have been shouted out the window for all the notice that the two women took. Furious, the femme reached up over the seat and grabbed a handful of the butch's hair. She jerked her head forward and then back, banging it against the window. "You fucking, lying bitch!"

  Oh, this was great. They were going to go right off the road and up in flames because of some ex-lovers' quarrel. Alison did a quick lane change, cutting a little too close in front of an RV, whose driver let her know with a blast on the horn. A quick glance to the mirror showed the femme's elbow planted firmly in the neck of the woman with the oxygen tank, Bernie.

  "Knock it off!" she shouted again, starting to pull onto the shoulder. "We're going to be in an accident if you don't knock it off!"

  The woman who from elimination must be the East Coast dyke, sat beside Pat with a frozen look on her face as if she'd attended too may bad family dinners as a child, but Bernie grabbed the femme's tightly clasped fist. She pulled back on her thumb and a second later the femme flew back against her seat shrieking as the black woman's hand grazed her nose on the way.

  "Don't you treat her like that!" Pat made a sudden change of alliance from the window seat. "Don't you hit her! I'll knock the shit out of you if you hit her! I've knocked the shit out of women who looked at her wrong—don't think I won't do it!" She started to climb right over the petrified woman in between.

  "Knock it off!" said Alison for the third time. She cut the engine." You either stop it right now or you're walking to town!"

  She would have liked to think that it was her I-mean-business voice and bearing that switched Pat's channel, but she knew in her heart it was not. These two were way too involved with one another to even hear outside interference.

  "Oh, Baby! What'd she do to you?" Pat pulled a black bandanna from her back pocket and held it up to the femme's nose. "Oh, Baby, you know I can't bear to see you hurt!"

  "Assholes!" said Bernie, but the two were not listening.

  Tenderly, as if she had a broken leg instead of a fat lip, Pat crawled right over the top of the others into the back seat and cradled her ex-girlfriend in her arms. Bernie rebuckled her seatbelt as she and the woman with the frozen smile resettled themselves.

  The Alabama woman gave Alison a look that was all too readable. These people are crazy. Let's get where we're going and let's get there quick. Alison started the engine.

  Chapter Two

  "So that was bad enough," Alison said to Liz, "but do you know what they did then?"

  "Could have been anything with this crowd," Liz replied in a distracted voice. "They could have set one another on fire in a suicide pact. I am noticing a great deal of blurred boundaries." The observation was acute, but her voice didn't hold that oh-so-gleeful tone into which it usually slipped during a good gossip. Like Stacy, Liz had been preoccupied with the conference for several weeks, though unlike Stacy, her attitude had been that everything and everyone was going to turn out just fine, so why fuss?

  Still, though she may have achieved her own personal nirvana, Liz was not immune to the tizzies of Mistress Anastasia, which was why she was carrying Stacy's briefcase and only half listening to Alison as they hurried up the street. They had pulled up to the Detour, the bar where the first night Meet and Beat was being held, at almost the same instant—Liz on an errand of retrieval connected with registration and Alison coming from home, where she'd gone for a two-hour nap after her last run. The parking lot was full and both had been forced to park on the street two blocks away.

  "Worse," Alison replied, hurrying a little to keep up. She knew that the last thing Liz wanted to do at this moment was listen to her story, but she figured that, with Stacy topping the registration, Liz distracted was about the best she was going to get. "No, they climbed into the back and fucked like walruses the whole rest of the way." Alison had seen a bit of walrus foreplay at Seaworld a couple of summers before, and it had left quite an impression. "And I don't mean a little discreet petting either—I mean screaming and bucking and lube flying!"

  "You should have done something about that," Liz replied, which was the last thing Alison wanted to hear. She knew she should have done something about it! That was the point of the story!

  "Duh!" she replied. "Except what? I didn't have a fire hose with me." She had been hoping Liz would be a bit more sympathetic to her plight. First of all, how was she supposed to know what was okay and what wasn't? From Stacy's conference stories she knew that public sex was not at all unheard of, though she had always imagined an audience being much more pleasant than the stony, pissed off silence in which she and the other three passengers had sat on the forty-five minute ride.

  Liz didn't answer. She had come to a halt and was looking intently up the street toward the bar, shading her eyes with one hand.

  "Oh, man," she said. "Is that what I think it is?"

  Alison looked. In front of the door marched a tight little circle of women carrying signs.

  "Oh, honestly," said Liz. "This is so irritating."

  "Who are they?" asked Alison, squinting and trying to read the signs. Liz's far-sightedness was the stuff of legends.

  "Oh, it's the Vanilla Sex Nazis," replied Liz in a disgusted tone.

  "Are you sure?" Alison, who really did not like unpleasantness of any kind, was not surprised to feel herself getting an upset stomach. She knew that there was a large group of women within the lesbian community who wanted to make sure the right to choose didn't extend to the leathergirls. How could she not know? She had been snubbed and called names before. But a protest at the door was not something she had anticipated, and it was not something good. With her FMS flaring it had become important lately to remain on an even keel whenever possible. That meant no picketing, please.

  "I recognize some of them from that SEPS group in Michigan," Liz answered. "Unless they're cloning themselves. That would be like them."

  Indeed, there was a kind of sameness to the women marching in rank. It was not in their size or color or how they dressed, but more in the tight little expressions of disapproval they wore. Alison watched in dismay as they confronted a group of leatherwomen headed for the door. She had heard stories from both Stacy and Liz about the women who had called themselves SEPS (an acronym Stacy swore stood for Sisters Endlessly Persecuting Sisters) at Michigan several years before. Their title had become a kind of generic word within the leather community to refer to all the woman whose main hobby, instead of sewing or Softball or cat shows, was confronting leatherwomen.

  "Guess what," said Alison after a moment of staring. "It gets better. Loo
k at the woman with the blue sign."

  Now both of them were shading their eyes. They put their hands down at the same moment and looked at one another with identical looks of dismay. There was no doubt about it. One of the main protesters was Liz's ex-lover, Carla.

  Carla had been one of those dates who in the end had turned out just not to be worth the six months of hot sex. But then, isn't hindsight always twenty-twenty? Two years ago none of them would have predicted that Carla would go from a leather jacket and consensual kinky sex straight to the ranks of abused victims. The rapidity with which she had made this switch had set so many heads spinning in Denver that a few were still reeling from the shock. It had been a relief to them all when Carla stopped stalking Liz at leather events and finally—probably a new girlfriend, everyone said— dropped out of sight.

  Grimly, they girded their loins and walked forward. As soon as they were within shouting distance, the taunts began.

  "You should be ashamed," shouted a woman holding a sign with the circular slogan 'Women against violence against women.' "S/m promotes violence against women!"

  "Fuck you," said Liz. "I'll do whatever I want in my own bedroom." Alison couldn't think of anything more original, so she kept her mouth shut. She was looking at Carla who was holding a sign that read, 'Victim of ritual s/m abuse.' Carla was not looking back at Alison. She was not looking at any of them.

  Another couple, two women obviously doing the daddy/boy thing had come up behind them and were now being included in the taunting.

  "Men rape and abuse women! Why do you want to identify with them?"

  "Be proud to be women! Be proud to be lesbians!"

  Suddenly, the younger of the daddy/boy duo threw herself right down on the ground in front of the line of protesters.

  "Ooooh," she howled in a disgraced voice. "I am bad! I am worthless! I am the scum of the earth!" She writhed on her back like a puppy showing submissiveness. "Punish me! Please punish me, Mistresses Separatist!"

  The leatherwomen burst into laughter. Alison laughed so hard she snorted like a pig. The protesters lost it totally, jerking back as if they had been splashed with filth. The daddy/boy jumped up off the sidewalk and pranced, pleased with herself.

  "Now, there's a good dog," said Liz. "I wish I had a biscuit." They took advantage of the protesters' momentary distraction to push through the bar door.

  Even though they had come early, the bar was already crowded and there were few tables to be had. The best one was being borne down upon by group traveling in pack formation. The Queen Bee was a tall woman Alison guessed to be in her forties. Her face was pale and gaunt, framed with long dark hair. About her swarmed five or six younger women, deferring to her as if to royalty. She was holding the handle of a chain leash which was attached to a collar around the neck of a nearly nude woman following behind her. Alison remembered bringing the whole bunch of them in from the airport the day before. Even then the woman with the leash hadn't been wearing much.

  Liz tossed the briefcase over three heads and onto the table. "Claimed," she said sweetly to the woman who was obviously the head handmaiden. She was one of those big old butch girls who were the lead dog for a reason. Always ready for a fight to the death.

  "Get your ass—" began the woman.

  "Oh, let's not talk about my ass," interrupted Liz in a seductive tone. "Let's talk about yours. I'd love to give you a good beating if you could take it. Meet me tonight at the dungeon?"

  That took the air out of her, and without a lead the rest of the team got tangled in the traces. They milled about, making a few threatening noises, and then suddenly at some command from the Queen Bee regrouped and changed direction.

  "Looking to get your butt kicked this weekend?" asked Alison, dropping into the chair across from Liz.

  "Oh, you'd defend me," Liz answered. "And I do so enjoy twisting Queen Livia's tail. It's so rare anyone does it."

  "I hope that protesting thing isn't going to be a problem," Alison said, looking over her shoulder at the front wall, which had a bank of windows. "What is with Carla, anyway? Did you do something to her that I don't know about?"

  "No," said Liz. "You know the whole story. Carla decided that she couldn't have sex any more..."

  "And you dumped her," filled in Alison.

  "Hardly a dump!" Liz protested. "We weren't really girlfriends..."

  "She thought you were girlfriends," said Alison.

  "Well, we weren't! We were just fuck buddies!"

  "You were girlfriends," said Alison. "You made us go on double dates with you. That's the deciding line—you don't force your friends to double date with your fuck buddies."

  "May I tell this story?" asked Liz. "Okay, maybe she thought we were girlfriends. Maybe we were girlfriends. But I didn't want to do the celibate girlfriend thing. Support, lavish with attention and let sleep in my bed without sex—that spells 'cat' to me. And I already had a cat. So, I dumped her. If you can call it that. But I was honorable about it! You know I was!"

  Alison had to acknowledge this. Liz had been honorable—far more honorable, in fact, than she herself would have been in the same circumstances. Liz had been up front with Carla, had tried to salvage the friendship, and when that had failed had even paid for Carla, who was as yet so young that her jobs skills were mostly knowing how to run a cash register, to go into therapy. All this while Carla was trashing the s/m community in general and Liz in particular.

  "You were honorable," admitted Alison. "If it had been me, I would have just killed her and left her body in an alley." She waved down a waitress and looked out the window. The SEPS, Carla right in the lead, had regrouped and were trying to deter another group of leatherwomen from entering the bar. "Shame! Shame!" could be heard. They were going to have to work on their strategy—across the room Alison could see the young woman who had horrified the protesters telling the story to friends with sweeping hand gestures.

  You could bet they'd all be out there rolling on the ground in a minute.

  "I should have," Liz admitted. "Maybe it's not too late." She stood, picking up the briefcase. "Well, I'm supposed to go and work the registration table. I think the work exchange person didn't show."

  "That would certainly vindicate Stacy," Alison replied. There had been an ongoing argument about work exchange from the day the Denver girls had committed to the event. Stacy, who had eventually been voted down, had been vehemently opposed to any work exchange whatsoever. If they couldn't pay the eighty dollars, then she didn't want them there, with the exception of Denver women whose trustworthiness could be vouched for. "If you see Salad, would you head her this way? She's supposed to drive the next shift, but I don't want to give up the table."

  Liz nodded. Alison watched her slow progress to the registration table, and then watched Stacy's equally slow progress back toward her. She had almost reached Alison when a big, butch gal stepped into her path.

  "Mistress Anastasia!" The name was long and drawn out—Alison hadn't heard such a squeal since the last time she saw k.d. lang live and the dykes in the cheap seats had gone crazy. She would not have guessed the big butch woman in the leather jacket could make such a sound. But then, life was full of surprises, wasn't it? She had the feeling this weekend was going to offer enough surprises to last for six months. Make that a year, she amended mentally as she watched the big woman pick Stacy up and lift her high in the air as if they were part of the Olympic ice hockey team.

  Stacy responded graciously, posing with her hands on the woman's shoulders and one leg raised in the back as if she were a fifties film starlet getting ready to exchange a chaste kiss before the wedding. Only her outfit was in contrast to this little display of coyness—like the butch, she was totally leathered from top to bottom. A small herd of bovines had given their lives for fashion here.

  The butch began to bring Stacy down a little too fast—Stacy was a big, tall woman—and Alison sprang to her feet, just in case Stacy landed on her two-inch heels with a crash and needed
an arm. But the bigger woman set Stacy down as gently as if she were a little china doll. She and Alison shared a butch-bonding glance—Alison's acknowledging what a good job the other woman had done showing off her sweetheart and returning her without harm, and the other woman nodding thanks for spotting.

  There was some kind of commotion outside and suddenly the flow of women heading up to the bar and registration table reversed itself, catching the big butch woman in an eddy. She waved as she was swept out the open door.

  Alison, by hooking one leg around their table and holding tightly to Stacy's arm, managed to save them from a similar fate. She was not going to lose their table. There were only chairs for about half of the women crowding the two rooms of the Detour and she intended to hog hers all night. Let somebody younger perch on the windowsill. They would have to kill her to get her chair.

  Hastily, as if her thoughts could be heard, she amended this ultimatum. Because, frankly, some of the women she had seen looked like they might not only enjoy a little death scene, but might then like to sit around and suck on the bones later. Okay, okay—she knew that almost everyone was just accessorizing, but she had never seen so much metal outside a hardware store in her life! Chains wound up like epaulets were fixed to the shoulders of leather jackets with big heavy clamps for what use Alison, who was a light player, did not care to speculate. Chains were draped to form harnesses and halters and belts—one woman was even wearing some kind of collar made out of barbed wire (being hugged gingerly). An electromagnet would have lifted nine tenths of the clientele to the ceiling.

  Stacy sank back down in her chair, fluffing her skirt (as much as leather can be fluffed, which with Stacy was actually quite a bit) and crossing her legs daintily. This was another reason they needed to keep the chairs—Stacy's high heels were causing a ripple in the butch girls reaching clear into the other room, but they were made to be looked at, not walked in. Only Alison knew that Stacy's black leather medical bag, which was probably tucked behind the registration table, carried not only the array of toys about which half the girls at the bar were fantasizing, but Stacy's sneakers and glasses as well. "Heels and contact lenses all weekend," Stacy always said, "is way too heavy bottoming for me."