For Troy, the thrill of doing it on the floor behind the cash register, at midnight, at gunpoint, enveloped him like a tingling electric blanket. A four-poster bed in a five-star hotel wouldn’t have been more pleasurable.

           Suzy’s heart was racing, and she could hear herself panting like Jeanette’s rottweiler AJ after a vigorous run. “Don’t stop,” she moaned.  

            
            “OK,” he told her as his excitement built. But the end came to a screeching halt all too soon. “Done,” he whispered into her ear, remaining on top of her, resting his head in the space between her shoulder and the side of her neck.

            
            “Now tell me you love me,” she dizzily instructed.

            
            “I hardly know you,” he barked. Suzy shoved the cold pistol into his bare back. “I love you,” he shouted.

            
            “What are your plans?” she asked.

            
            “I work till seven, then sleep for a few hours.”

            
            “I mean with your life.”

           Just then, red and blue flashing lights brightened the dark from the other side of the glass. “Come out with your hands above your head,” a deep, disembodied male voice boomed through a megaphone. Unbeknownst to Suzy and Troy, six squad cars had silently swarmed into the parking lot as a result of the liquor store’s surveillance camera and its link to the local police station.   

            
            The teenagers threw on their clothing in the moving light.  Troy, his nerves noticeably jangled, quivered as he zipped his pants. He had the terrified look of a little boy caught breaking some rigid, unsparing rule.

           Before she knew it, Suzy was in handcuffs, being led out of the store by a gruff, strapping officer. The parking lot, teeming with policemen, looked like a convention, but Suzy appeared calm. Troy had tapped into a part of her that she didn’t know existed, a well of emotion so potent and magical that her impending arrest mattered very little. For the first time in her young life, she knew what it felt like to be hopelessly in love, and to her it felt like discovering the moon.  

            Troy didn’t want to press charges, but his outraged parents insisted. A media circus ensued, bringing enormous attention to the Herzog family. Nine-year-old Nadine was whisked away from Ryoko and Rolf thanks to the efforts of a no-nonsense representative of Child Welfare Services. The girl’s tonsillectomy was performed without a hitch (paid for by the state), and she was placed in a foster home with two caring parents, three older sisters and a baby ferret.

           Suzy was carted off to a high-security correctional facility for women.  

           Prison regulations were severe:  Three showers per week (supervised). No mirrors in the cells. No internet access. No catalogue shopping allowed. But Suzy breezed through each day and night with ease, finding joy everywhere, even in the angry eyes of the most hardened inmates. Melanie Drizzle, serving a life sentence for smothering her mother and torturing a ten-year-old girl who knew too much, often said Suzy was surrounded by a soothing blue aura.

            Many of the inmates felt they were wrongly convicted. Many were lying. Jocelyn Datz claimed her wealthy husband accidentally fell off their balcony to his death. Unfortunately, her previous spouse had plunged to his untimely demise from the same balcony. Debra “Two-By-Four” Davis was one of the few who admitted she murdered with premeditation and would do so all over again. Her attorney-girlfriend Polly had been pawing her adult daughter (from a previous union) for more than six months. In

Two-By-Four’s suspicious eyes, Polly’s actions were unforgivable, so she poisoned her lawyer-lover with a lethal dose of horse tranquilizer.

            During her first six weeks as a caged criminal, Suzy could barely stop gushing about Troy, recounting her tale of robbery and desire to Jocelyn, Two-By-Four, and the other incarcerated gals. When she spoke, she saw his face, felt his touch, relived the rapture. She came alive.

           Then one day, not only did Suzy stop mentioning him, her effervescent personality seemed to vanish. She became sullen, glum. During woodwork shop, Jocelyn pulled her aside. “What’s wrong, baby?” she asked. “You’re not your usual bubbly self.”  

            “Now it hurts just to think about him,” she admitted. “I want to see him so much I can hardly stand it.”

            “Well, you’ll be out of this hell hole soon. You’ll see him again.”

            “You think he’d want to date a girl who held him up?” she asked.

            “You made a mistake, that’s all. Besides, he told you he loved you.”

            “Yeah, with a gun in his back.”

            Lying in her small, dreary cell, there were nights Suzy thought she might lose her mind. Repressing urges to pull the hair from her head or bite her flesh till it bled, she shut her eyes and clutched the ragged mattress, hands in throbbing fists. She’d known loneliness before, but this was a different sort; this was choking her. Being separated from someone she desperately, obsessively needed was more painful than anything she’d ever felt.

            
            Suzy’s imagination was her enemy. She pictured Troy with pretty, perky girls, lusting after them as they lusted after him. She heard Troy boasting about the dramatic liquor store seduction to his friends. Worst of all, she imagined him going about his daily routine with all memory of their intimate encounter behind the counter erased from his mind.

            During Suzy’s fourth month behind bars, the anguish began to fade. With the passing of each identical week, she began thinking less and less about Troy because she began thinking less and less about absolutely everything. She picked herself up each morning and did what was expected of her, but she was only going through the motions, as if by rote. Suzy was becoming a different person, a roboticized version of her previous self, devoid of feeling. At a certain point, she became immune to gray walls, prison grub and prison garb. She didn’t care if she ever got out.

           When she was told what had happened to her mother and father, Suzy reacted without emotion. Ryoko and Rolf had been drinking and smoking when they passed out late one Saturday night. A lit cigarette set a paper bag on fire, and it wasn’t long before the walls, roof, and furniture were engulfed in huge flames, turning everything, including the flesh and bones of Ryoko and Rolf, into ash.  

            By the end of Suzy’s seven month sentence (reduced from eleven for good behavior), she was living in a dense, tranquilizing fog and had forgotten about Troy Smith entirely. Luckily, the money she had saved from her part-time glassblowing job was still in her bank account, and the beat-up Volkswagen Rabbit hadn’t been touched by the house fire. Suzy headed south, through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, straight into Florida.

           South Beach was a town Suzy had always wanted to visit; in her mind it was a magical destination, like the land of Oz.  But this bustling place, with its towering hotels, crowded streets and cosmopolitan ambience, intimidated her more than she could have imagined.   

            Suzy’s alabaster skin paled in comparison to everyone’s golden tan. Her ratty outfit seemed out of place next to everyone’s designer duds. As she sipped from a Starbucks cup on a bench in Little Havana, several bronzed passers-by gawked at her as if she were a pariah. A handsome guy in a gray Gucci T-shirt plopped down next to her. “You’d be a looker if you did something with yourself,” he said. “Buy new clothes, get some color, do something with your hair.”

           “I’ll work on it as soon as I finish my soy latte,” she responded with sarcasm.  

           “I can help you.”  Confidence oozed from him like oil from a gushing well.

           “Oh yeah?  Put me in short shorts and a halter top?  And what would your take be?  Fifty per cent?”

            “Hey,” he said. “That’s not what I’m suggesting.”

            “Then what is it you want?”

            “How do you make a living?” he asked.

            “I hold up liquor stores,” she nonchalantly stated.

           The man chuckled. “My name is Dark McGinnis and I run a modeling agency.”  He reached into the pocket of his Armani jeans and took out a Louis Vuitton business card holder. Then he removed a small white card and handed it to Suzy. “If you clean yourself up, you could have a career, make ten thousand a day. Work in Paris, Milan. Become a sought-after face, a catwalk queen, a calendar girl. But don’t call me until you clean yourself up, and I mean head to toe.” 

           Suzy gazed at him with astonishment. “Your name is Dark?” she asked.  

           Dark McGinnis didn’t respond. Instead he rose from the bench and smugly strolled away, his Kenneth Cole leather loafers clacking on the sidewalk. A few minutes later, Suzy wandered down the street until she came upon a liquor store. She ambled in  and bought her dinner.

            Carrying a brown paper bag containing a bottle of Ketel One and a container of Tropicana orange juice, Suzy checked into an old art deco-style motel a half mile from the ocean. She sat on the dingy double bed in the dim light of a silver lamp, downing one

drink after another while trying to ignore the scent of stale cigarette smoke. The low rumbling of the ice machine on the other side of the wall sounded like a weapon of mass destruction firing up.  

            Suzy caught sight of the business card of Dark McGinnis which she had placed on the circular-top side table. She picked it up and stared at its perfect black lettering. “A calendar girl,” she muttered with disgust. Then she lit a match, momentarily brightening

the room with a flash of brilliance. She brought the flame to the rectangular card and watched it burst into orange heat. The combination of the vodka in her system and the noxious smoke from the lit match caused her to pass out and drop the blazing business card on the paper bag from the liquor store.    

            
            Within five minutes, a huge fire roared.

            Within one hour, the walls, roof, furniture, phone books, phones, and figural nude paintings (in their faux gilded wood frames), not to mention the flesh and the bones of Suzy Herzog and one other motel guest (a young heroin addict named Troy Smith), turned to ash.

            
             

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