of it. It would come to her in due time. Her memory was oddly fuzzy.
But the wigs, now...her eyes fell on a platinum blonde creation, in a Farrah Fawcett style. Twenty-nine ninety-eight, the tag said. Cheap, she thought, for such a beautiful head of hair.
“Hair,” she said aloud. “That’s what I need. Hair. Turbans are so out.” She whipped the makeshift turban from her head and tossed it into the street.
Of course the store’s entrance door was locked at this time of night, and, for some reason that she did not examine, she felt certain she was not likely to get back to shop in the morning, during normal business hours. She looked around and her glance fell on a broken piece of brick lying in the gutter. She picked it up and hefted it in her hand.
“We oughtn’t to be naughty,” she said aloud. “We really oughtn’t.” After only a moment’s hesitation, she lobbed the brick through the plate glass window. Crash! A shower of glass crystals rained down upon the sidewalk.
An alarm went off inside. Pooh, now the police will be on their way, she thought. Well, she consoled herself, her shopping would not take more than a minute, surely. She grabbed the blonde wig and plopped it on her head, unmindful of the fact that it was askew. She found a wallet in her fanny pack and took out a wad of cash, fingering through it. She slapped bills down in the window in quick succession. A five. Slap. Two more fives and a ten. How much was that? She counted out five ones and tossed them down beside the naked Styrofoam head. That was thirty, wasn’t it?
She was about to go when she noticed the make-up display. Yes, of course, she thought, I must have makeup too. And perfumes, you had to have perfume to be a real woman. There were bottles and bottles of perfumes here, and lipsticks. She grabbed a handful of the lipsticks and checked them for color. Too red. Too orange. Ugh. It was certainly evident that some people had no sense of style.
Inside the store, the alarm continued to ring ceaselessly. Clearly this was taking far too long. The police would be coming any minute now, wouldn’t they?
The police—something about the police teased her mind; but there wasn’t time now for her to think about that. She must away. She snatched up a huge purse from the window display and raked the entire array of makeup into it: lipsticks and rouges, mascara and scents, a full arsenal of quasi-feminine pulchritude.
Oh, dear, she thought, looking at the cash she had left. She really did not have time to add up her “purchases” and the money she had didn’t look like enough anyway. On the other hand, she truly did not want to cheat anyone either. She was not a dishonest person, after all. She had a great respect for the law. She was sure of it.
She fumbled one of the lipsticks out of the purse and used it to write on the broken glass: “I.O.U. for all these goodies. I promise to come back and pay.” She signed it Drag Thing and as an afterthought added a final, “I truly do promise.”
A wail in the distance warned of the approach of a police car. She started to go, and saw an enormous pair of shoes on a platform at the rear of the window, wonderful strapped things with towering heels and all aglitter with sequins that blinked an invitation at her.
How on earth had she missed those? She grabbed them as well before she turned and ran, her long, powerful legs eating up the distance in a flash, so that she had already vanished into the foggy night by the time the police car roared to the curb outside For The Girls.
As she ran, Drag Thing sang under her breath, and unfailingly out of tune, that song about how hard it was to be a woman.
CHAPTER THREE
It was a contradiction, of sorts, but it was at times like these—in the wake of some action on the street—that Teri felt most like a woman.
“It was really something,” she told Peter, her voice vibrant with excitement. “These street toughs flagged us down, two of them, they’re part of a trio who call themselves The Moes. I’ve tangled with them before, and usually they take off running when we come around, you know, and here they were tonight, jumping up and down and waving at us. And when I got a look at them, they looked like they had been through a war zone. One of them had to be taken to the emergency room, even. His leg was messed up.”
Teri’s dark eyes flashed with eagerness as she undressed. Action on the job never failed to turn her on sexually, and this time was no exception. Her fingers fairly flew over the buttons of her uniform. In a moment her tunic was gone, and her bra after it. She tossed them aside impatiently.
“Street toughs,” Peter said in a puzzled tone, running his fingers through his rumpled hair. “The Moes, did you say they called themselves? You know, it’s funny, but, I had the strangest dream earlier, there were some guys like that in it, too....”
He had awakened only minutes before, sprawled naked across the bed and with the most overwhelming headache he had ever in his life experienced. It felt like all the hangovers of the world rolled into one monstrous one. But, why would he have a hangover? He couldn’t remember drinking anything. In actual fact, he rarely drank more than a single beer or a glass of wine, and never on work nights.
“And here’s the really crazy part, they hadn’t even been in your usual street fight with another gang,” Teri said, shedding holster and gun, “They said it was just one drag queen who had worked them over. Can you imagine, one little drag queen beating the crap out of a gang of tough street punks. Well, not so little, I guess. They said she was enormous. Eight feet tall, if you can believe them, which is probably an exaggeration. I mean, they wouldn’t want to admit they had been worked over by someone normal sized, would they? And she called herself Drag Thing, they said. Isn’t that funny? Usually, you know, they give themselves women’s names, Delora or Angelina, something like that.”
The name seemed to ring a bell in Peter’s mind, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. “Drag Thing? What...what kind of a name is that?” he asked. “It sounds like someone was pulling their legs.”
“Someone pulled one leg, that’s for sure,” she said, “Pulled it right out of a socket. It had to be reset.” She dragged her trousers down and kicked them aside. “It was for real, though, that name I mean, because just a little while later we got a call on a break-in a few blocks away, and someone had cleaned out a shop window, For The Girls, it’s a specialty shop for drag queens—you know, shoes, makeup, the works—and the perp left a sort of I.O.U. written on the glass in lipstick. Signed it Drag Thing.” She rolled down her panties, threw them aside too, and grinned excitedly at him. “Guess what I want to do?”
“Uh, you just got home,” Peter said, his head still pounding from his mysterious hangover. “Aren’t you hungry, honey? Don’t you want to eat something?”
“You bet I do.” She grabbed him by the arm and hurried him toward the bed he’d just gotten up from. For the moment, he forgot his headache. Teri could be very persuasive when she was excited.
* * * *
Later, freshly showered and smelling of Chanel Number Five, Teri sniffed the air and followed the scent of bacon frying. She found Peter in the kitchen at the stove fixing her breakfast. He was still naked except for a frilly little apron he had tied on that left his backside enticingly bare.
“What’s this?” she asked. She held up a large piece of blue-and-white fabric.
Busy flipping slices of bacon, he said, without turning from the stove, “I don’t know; where was it?”
“On your sewing machine.”
