“Can I maybe get a word in edgewise here?”

“No!”

“I’m glad you’re being so reasonable, baby. You think maybe we could continue this inside?”

“Why? Am I embarrassing you? Is itpossible for me to embarrass you worse than you’ve already embarrassed yourself?”

“Probably-eh! — not.” Jules managed to back his way out of the crawl space. He dusted the mud off his hands and knees, then glanced nervously up and down the block. “Look, honey, I enjoy an open-air humiliation as much as the next guy, but it’s just not safe for us to be out here right now. Can weplease go inside?”

Maureen blocked the door with the formidable barricade of her body. “Not until you promise to tell me exactly what you’ve been up to tonight. And don’t even try to bullshit me-when it comes to you, my bullshit detector’s as sensitive as a just-circumcised pecker.”

Jules peered fearfully up the deserted street. “All right! I promise! I promise!”

Maureen unlocked the door and stalked into her kitchen. She flung open her refrigerator door, grabbed a glass milk container filled with blood, and took a long, deep slug straight from the bottle. Pointedly, she didn’t offer Jules a drink before slamming the refrigerator door shut again.

“Tell me,” she said.

Jules cautiously sat himself opposite her, careful to keep the table between them. “Well, since you hafta know, I was out doin‘ some research.“

“What kind of research?”

“Research on recruitin‘ an army.”

“What?”

Jules told her about his brainstorm. Maureen’s face remained strangely expressionless, almost dazed. Hoping to curry favor by reassuring her that he was taking good and prudent care of his health, he also mentioned his acquisition of the miracle antidiabetes pills.

Maureen sank heavily onto a kitchen chair. “The rest. Out with it. Considering how I found you dressed and where you were, that can’t beall you were up to tonight.”

“Uh, well, yeah…” Jules paused before mustering enough courage to continue. “I got jumped by a few of Malice X’s thugs. But don’t worry-I managed to give ‘em the slip.”

Maureen sighed and slowly shook her head. “From bad to worse.” She leaned her forehead against her hand, leaving her palmprints’s impression in her thick makeup. “So now he knows you’re back in town. It’s amazing what you’ve been able to accomplish in a single unchaperoned evening.”

She rose from the table and walked crisply from the room.

Jules had steeled himself for a screaming fit. But seeing her leave was even more alarming. “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to do something I should’ve done the instant you arrived on my doorstep,” she shouted from the next room.

Jules overheard the distinct tones of a long-distance number being dialed on a push-button phone. He quickly followed her into her living room. “Who are you callin‘?”

Maureen finished punching in the number from her red leather-covered phone directory. “It’s obvious that you are too headstrong, unpredictable, and stupid to be left unsupervised. Unfortunately, my work makes it impossible for me to be your full-time nanny. So I’m calling someone who can hopefully keep you from getting yourself permanently extinguished.”

“Who?”

“Do the initialsD.B. mean anything to you?”

It took a few seconds to register, but when it did, Jules’s face turned purple in a hurry. “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare call him!”

Maureen smiled tightly. “Oh, but I just did. And it sounds like he’s picking up. Yes, here he is now-”

“Put that phone down!”

Maureen tensed her free hand into a menacing claw and waved Jules away. “Hello, Doodlebug? You’ll never guess who this is-yes, that’sright! I’m amazed you still recognize my voice, honey. Iknow it’s been ages! How the hell are you?”

Jules squared his shoulders and took two hulking steps forward. “Maureen, this is the last straw! Either you hang up that phone right now, or I’m outta here. Hear me? Keep talkin‘ to that little nutcase, and you’ll force me to walk right out the door.”

Maureen’s smile remained stiffly frozen on her face. “Oh, that’swonderful, Doodlebug! Look, could you hold on just a minute? I’ve got a visitor here, another person from your past, and he’sunpardonably impatient to speak with me.”

She put her hand over the phone’s speaking end. All traces of a smile immediately melted from her countenance. “You want to walk out the door, Jules? Be my guest. Better yet-don’tbe my guest! Just go. My watch says you’ve got about fifty minutes to sunrise. If you intend to sleep anywhere outside this house, I suggest you get busy. Oh, and while you’re tending to your sleeping arrangements, please don’t forget to give my best to your playmates from the projects.”

Jules knew when he’d been nailed. And she’d just nailed his feet to the hardwood floor. His bluff twitched briefly, then stiffened into rigor mortis. Unable to think of a single word in reply, he stalked out of the room. Behind him, Maureen resumed her conversation. “Oh, I’m so sorry, thank you for being patient. Yes. He was suffering from a bit of stomach upset, the poor dear…”

Scowling under his breath, Jules climbed the stairs to Maureen’s bedroom, a windowless room set in the middle of the second floor. Apart from an impressively large flat-panel television, the only piece of furniture in the high-ceilinged room was a custom-built double-king-sized water bed. This monumental contrivance sat low to the ground in the midst of a neatly combed plot of earth, which was planted with a variety of night-blooming flowers. The orderliness of the indoor garden was marred somewhat by the uneven mounds of dirt Jules had taken earlier from his car’s trunk and dumped around the bed.

The strangeness of this setup compared to the traditional coffins he’d occupied barely even registered on Jules’s troubled mind. Still boiling with anger and humiliation, he grabbed the remote control from atop the flat-panel display and flopped onto the water bed, purposefully mashing a few blossoms on the way.

The slow-motion sloshing did nothing to better his mood. He braced himself against the bed frame and turned on the TV. For the next five minutes he clicked ceaselessly through dozens of satellite stations, searching for a glimpse of naked female bodies (or anything less repulsive than a miracle-diet show or an infomercial promoting adult incontinence products). He finally settled on a low-budget erotic retelling of the Snow White story, dubbed into Spanish. Everyone was a lesbian-Snow White, the wicked queen, all seven dwarfs, and even the prince(ss). Jules made a few feeble attempts to whack off, most energetically during the “Whistle While You Work” musical orgy scene. But his heart wasn’t in it. By the time Maureen climbed the stairs half an hour later, he’d switched over to an episode ofThe Rockford Files.

“Are you done sulking yet?” Maureen asked, standing in the doorway. She’d removed her makeup and changed into a surprisingly modest and tasteful white nightgown.

“Men don’t sulk,” Jules answered, returning his attention to James Garner.

“Yeah. Right. And pigeons don’t shit in Jackson Square, neither.”

“So what kinda big plans did you and your little pervert pal hatch behind my back? Or am I too ‘stupid’ and ‘unpredictable’ for you to bother tellin‘ me?”

“Turn offRockford and I’ll fill you in, Mr. Pouty.”

Jules clicked off the TV.

Maureen crossed the path leading through her garden and sat on the bed’s padded frame. “First off, you should know, whether you’re willing to admit it or not, that Doodlebug is a damn good friend of yours. I told him the whole story, and he’s dropping everything to fly out and help you the night after tomorrow night. Now keep in mind, he’s the head of a very important business-”

“A freaky cult, you mean!”

“A very important and profitablebusiness — more than you’ve ever accomplished inyour long unlife, I might add-and he’s putting everything on hold to fly here from his compound in northern California. Nowthat’s friendship for you! He’s very devoted to you, Jules. I just don’t understand why you shun him so.”