'Death-bug – God, murder – uuugh, God...'

She tries to close back her legs, wriggles hard, but she's lost, I'm on fire, committed even more now she's shy of her musky damp. I pull aside her weeping panty to face a delta writhing with meats, glistening with sweat carrying spicy coded silts from her ass; olives, cinnamon dust and chili blood. She gives up, beaten, without a secret left in the animal world. Her knees bend up and she takes in my tongue, my finger, and my face, she cries and bucks, horny ridges, ruffles, and grits suck me up, suck me home to the stinking wet truth behind panties, money, justice, and slime, burning trails through my brain like acid through butter. Pink Fucken Speed.

'Ugh, fuck! Tell me what you did to those people, tell me you loved it.'

I don't make a sound.

'Tell me! Tell me you killed!'

She starts to tighten her legs, draw away, and I whisper until she relaxes, and pulls me back to her vee. I've heard about these kinds of girls.

'Did you, Vern, did you do all that for me – for us…?'

I feel a fatal oscillation on the head of my man, press him into the bedclothes, rub the stitching across his veins. 'Yeah,' I moan. 'I did it for you.' I keep whispering, but a new reality seeps into me, heavy like the beginnings of an infection. Suddenly her pout turns to rubber, her breeze to raw shrimp and metal-butter. Something ain't right. She scoots to the edge of the bed. Her cleft sneers through the silk of her panties as she bends over one last time. I know I've had the last of Taylor Figueroa. My world dissolves under my belly with a jet like stung snakes squirted out through their own eye-holes. Then quiet. Just a slow ocean moving slowly, and spit-curry after-poon drying cold on my face. Taylor pulls up her shorts, ties her sandals, flicks her hair in the mirror.

'Okay!' she says into the breast of her jacket.

The door opens and four men walk in. I shield my eyes from the glaring camera lights. 'Vernon Gregory Little?' asks one. Like – duh.

I could handle everybody in the lobby staring at me, if only one of them was Taylor. She doesn't stare, or even look. She crouches next to a smiling technician, and listens to an earpiece connected to wires in her jacket.

Then she giggles into a microphone. 'It's so exciting. You really think I can anchor the show? Like, God, Lalito…'

I'm led away from her crouching ass, an ass barely dry with my spit and my dreams. Her careless laugh follows me from the lobby. People around the hotel entrance fall silent when I come through in hand and leg cuffs. You can actually hear indoor palms rustling in the air-conditioning, that's how quiet things get. Quiet and icy-cold, I don't have to tell you. A plane is waiting at the airport. Right away you know some money got invested in the story. Like, it'd be hard to tell some anchorman it was all just a big mistake. Anchormen across the land would drop mountainous loads if you tried to tell them that. I struggle to work up some cream pie. But I can't, can I fuck. Instead I choke on aviation perfume, and the 'Goodbye' sound of jets whining, like when Nana used to go up north. Across the way, you can see stressed passengers shuffling to immigration without a thought in their heads except the shine on their mall-brand luggage. Me, I'm tied in a metal tube with two marshals who choose conversations according to how well they contrast with the fucken shit I'm in. Talk about their car, a steak dinner, a ball game. One of them farts.

I just sit and watch a flashbulb on the tip of the wing light up the dark outside. After a couple of hours of flashes, which is a lot, we descend through puffy tumors that hang over Houston Intercontinental airport. When the plane turns to land you get a view of eight thousand patrol cars on the ground, lights flashing off recently wet concrete, and probably sirens and game-show buzzers running as well. All for little Vernon, Vernon Little. After landing, the plane turns toward some bleachers set up around an empty section by the airport perimeter. We slow and park sideways to the stands, and I'm drenched through the window by flashlight from crowds of media. You physically feel the jackrab-bit pulse that says, 'There he is!' It's Tuesday, exactly three weeks since hell's tumble-dryer went to work on our lives. Although it's four in the morning, you just know every household in the land is tuned in. 'There he fucken is!'

The marshals handle me down the steps of the plane, and parade me in front of the bleachers. Behind the bleachers is a fence, and behind the fence you can sense hordes of angry people, the type that show up wherever angry people are needed. I'm lifted into the back of a white truck, where some men in lab coats and helmets are waiting. They harness me into a chair, and we get escorted into town by half the world's police cars. All the world's helicopters ride overhead, beaming lights down like a Hollywood premiere, the fucken Slime Oscars, boy. One learning I can give you from here: patrol cars don't smash up everywhere. Not at all. Nor do you get any simple ideas about how to distract the cops while you make a break for it, and leave them smashing into each other, and driving off bridges and shit. What's more, as soon as you're in a patrol car, you're immediately visited by the certainty that it won't happen. They drive fucken straight, take note.

Everybody has their fucken fun tonight, showing some future impartial jury how innocent I must be. Then I get banged back up to hell. Not back home, but down here, in Harris County, where all the big stuff happens.

I close my eyes in the cell, and do a re-cut of my life. In my cut of the thing, I ain't even in shit at all. Instead, I'm the kid out there who hears about somebody else's trouble, maybe some other kid took his dad's assault rifle to class and blew away half his buddies, Lord knows it fucken happens. Maybe I'd be the kid just hearing about it. Hearing about some poor fuck, probably the quiet one, the wordsmith, the one with thoughts and shit, at the back of the class. Until the gun came to school. I'd be the guy just hearing about it, with the tickly kind of luxury of deciding whether to be sympathetic or devastated, or not even pay attention at all, the way people do when shit happens that doesn't involve them. That's the kind of day I re-shoot in my head. Still full of different melted things, and dogs and all, but with me the outsider, up the street getting ice-cream, ignoring my carefree years, the way we do, and just getting bored and ornery.

I'm trying to sleep when the other cons on my row are waking up. One of them hears me sigh, and tosses some words through his door. 'Little? You a fuckin star!'

'Yeah, right,' I say. 'Tell the prosecution.'

'Hell, youse'll get the bestest fuckin attorneys, hear what I'm sayin?'

'My attorney can't even speak fucken English.'

'Nah,' says the con, 'they dissed his ass, he history. I saw on TV he said he still workin on it, but that's bullshit, he ain't even hired no more. You get big guns now, hear what I'm sayin?'

The guy eventually quiets up, and I snatch an hour of shitty sleep. Then a guard comes to maneuver me to a phone at the end of the row. He marches me proudly past all the other cells, kind of parades in front of them, and everybody jams up to their doors to watch me pass.

'Yo, Burn! Burnem Little, yo!'

I get sat by the phone. The guard fits himself an earpiece, then dials home for me. The number's disconnected. I get him to dial Pam's.

'Uh-huh?' she answers through a mouthful of food.

'Pam, it's Vern.'

'Vern? Oh my Lord, where are you?'

' Houston.'

'Hell, that's right – we saw it on TV. Are they feeding you?'

The guard leans over and whispers, 'Egg and chorizo, half an hour.'