Dorito Marie Thomasson lay on her side on the cold, slightly sticky aluminum floor of the walk-in freezer at Pandora’s Pizza.  Her arms were behind her back, her hands tied to her ankles, and the stupid skirt she was wearing had ridden up so high on her thighs she couldn’t pull it down even by sliding across the floor.  All in all, it was an undignified way to end the day.  Dori didn’t normally get hung up about dignity, but right now she was noticing it.

At least no one was in the mood to make fun of her.  Her boyfriend Smile was sitting upright, wrists tied to one of the cooling racks stacked high with salad fixings and pizza toppings.  His face was glazed with blood from a gash he’d acquired by trying not to be tied up.  Some of his long black hair stuck to it, and it had flowed down around his aquiline nose in a way that was half “Braveheart”-noble and half Bruce Lee-melodramatic.  In the other corner, Amber was hog-tied like Dori was, and perhaps even less dignified because she’d wet herself.  The cooler was filled with a sharp, ammoniac odor that Dori was going to forever remember as Stupid Girl Fear-Pee.  Amber had been whimpering for ten solid minutes; neither Dori nor Smile had any reassuring words at the moment.

Walter, the night manager, had been taken away with a bag tied over his head about a minute before Amber started whimpering.  The four men who had just robbed the restaurant said they’d release him in an hour, once they’d gotten away.  If someone called the cops, Walter was going to eat a bullet.

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Dori, Smile, and Amber looked at each other in blank surprise.

There was a second knock.  “Hello?”  The latch rattled.

“We’re in here!” Amber screamed, her desperate voice echoing off of the walls.  Dori flinched.  “Please, oh God, please open the door!”

“There seems to be something wedged in it.  A screwdriver or something.”

“Please, please help us!” Amber cried.

Dori sighed and tried to push herself to a sitting position.  It didn’t work.  Didn’t anyone have the slightest idea what to do about this?  “Hey, could you push the panic button?  Someone robbed the store.  There should be a white button that’ll trip the alarm and the cops will come, on the wall by the desk,”

There was a moment of silence, but they could hear someone moving around.  “Oh, yes, here it is.  I just push it?”

“Yeah.  I would just leave whatever’s stuck in the door there, or the cops will be pissed about you moving evidence.”  Pandora’s had been robbed before; Dori hadn’t been working that time, but Bill had said that the cops were uptight about their “crime scene” afterward.  Ypsilanti was a college town, and there weren’t too many armed robberies, so the cops were probably overzealous with excitement.

“Will you be okay in there?”

“No!” Amber screamed.  “Get us the fuck out of here!”

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The policemen–who were detectives actually, Dori assumed, since they weren’t in uniform–insisted on driving her to the station.  That was fine with her, seeing as how the cop shop in question was in Ypsilanti (Ypsi to its friends), which was also where Pandora’s was, and Dori usually burned a quarter tank of gas going to and from work.  That was impressive, considering it was a twenty-five-gallon tank, or something like that.  So if the police wanted to drive, that was fine with her.  She had pulled on some ‘whatever’ clothes (whatever she could find) that consisted of a pair of Smile’s jeans and a sky blue sweatshirt that had once read “Seattle” but was washed well past the point of legibility.  A pair of red and white thrift shop Air Jordans (too big) and an equally thrift shop knee-length leather and sheepskin coat (which didn’t look nearly as fancy as it sounded) completed the ensemble.

Dori had never been in a police car, that she could remember.  This one was unmarked, but it felt like a cop car should feel, with vinyl seats and no door handles in the back.  Detective Braum and his partner Rawski had very little to say during the twenty minute drive.  Dori wondered if she looked like a hardened criminal to passers-by, assuming they could even tell it was a cop car.

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Dori was not in the habit of screaming in pain, and never really had been.  She had a profound childhood memory of getting a sewing needle stabbed deep under the nail of her thumb (only a half inch of it protruded) and she hadn’t screamed then either, just appeared in the kitchen in front of her mother with tear-swollen eyes and blood running down her arm.  The pain-noise connection had just never been there.

Screaming in fright was a different matter entirely.  When Cherry bit her leg, it didn’t hurt much–more of an uncomfortably firm clamping sensation–but then Brian saw what was happening.  He jumped up and cried, “Cherry!  No!” and that was what got Dori screaming.

Her throaty ex-smoker’s shriek in turn agitated Cherry even further, and the dog promptly began shaking Dori’s leg fiercely, tearing denim and pulling her victim off-balance.  Not particularly graceful under the best of circumstances, Dori flailed at Brian’s desk and fell over backward, managing to take the phone and most of the books on top of the desk with her.

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Getting up early to go get his mother’s prescription (she didn’t know how to drive) and getting nailed by a Pittsfield Township cop for fifty-five in a thirty should have been Smile’s warning that it was going to be a bad day.  That ticket took his license up to ten points, not to mention what it would do to his damn insurance.  All of which would make it just a little bit harder to make rent next month.

And then he and Dori had had a stupid fight.  Okay, he had started it, and he knew it–she had called and told him she’d bought a new car, and he had gotten pissed.  Some part of him had wanted to go through the selection process with her.  He had figured it would take at least a week for her to look at cars and decide, and she’d gone out and bought the first thing she’d looked at, without even sleeping on it.  Neons were okay cars, but it was bad to buy anything that expensive on impulse.  The way she’d sprung it on him had taken him by surprise, and he’d yelled at her mostly because he was still frustrated about the ticket.  Since when did she do things on impulse, though?  Dori was about the most indecisive woman he’d ever known, always having to think about things for days on end, and all of a sudden here she was walking off and dropping a year’s salary on a new car without even telling anyone she was going to do it.

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“What is it about makeup sex?” Smile asked as he lay on his back beside Dori, looking up at the basement ceiling.  After a bit of necking on the sofa they had adjourned to the basement (as they often did for their midnight meetings), partially because Dori’s bedroom was right next to her aunt and uncle’s, and partly because her metal-framed bed squeaked like crazy.  Sometimes the headboard would bang against the wall, too.  Even if they hadn’t been worried about waking up the homeowners (although Smile had a feeling, from talking to Dori’s aunt, that they wouldn’t be pissed off anyway, just quietly glad that their niece was showing signs of normalcy), the shrieking springs were distracting.  Something about the cliche of the bed’s squeaking invariably got both of them giggling and ruined the moment.

“I dunno,” Dori replied sleepily.  With the lights off, Smile could just barely make out the aluminum ducts above him in the trickle of night-light that squirmed in through the narrow basement windows.  Dori was in a puddle of shadow and he couldn’t see her at all, couldn’t tell if her eyes were open or closed.  “Maybe s’cuz you’re so worked up and angry when you’re fighting that you can’t imagine anything working out in the end.  Every fight always feels like it’s the last straw, and you’re just going to have to say fuck this, and the last thing you think is that in a few hours you’re going to be screwing on a pool table.  And so it’s a surprise and a relief when it happens.”

“Actually, it was a rhetorical question,” he said.  “But thanks for the dissertation.”

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Dori’s first thought as the three burly football fans moved to block her way was, Oh, shit, not again.  She’d been beaten up by men larger and more numerous than herself before, and was considerably less than eager to repeat the experience.  It was too cold to run back to the car, or to stand around outside hoping they’d get bored, however, so she merely altered her course and walked toward the back of the restaurant.  She could go in through the back door.  If she was lucky, one of the delivery drivers might be back there as well.

“Where you going?” one of the footballers called out tauntingly.  “You don’t want to be late for work, do you?”

Dori said nothing.  The best way to deal with bullies was to play turtle, she knew from experience.  Skunks and porcupines had a good plan too, but she was short on quills or scent glands at the moment.

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She expected the phone to ring again immediately after she hung it up, like it always seemed to do when the last thing they needed were more orders, but it didn’t.

Dori went to the register with a handful of paper towels so she could dry her hair and face, looking out at the table that had come in earlier and were still there.  They were sort of an odd couple; he was a tall thirtysomething guy in a suit that was expensive but looked sort of rumpled, like he’d slept in it.  He had a beard that was disturbingly close to being a Kenny Loggins rug, too.  Not good.  He was all burly, almost like a football player or a lumberjack, bigger than Daniel even, but the suit suggested that he really did something else.  The chick he was with was Asian–Dori wasn’t about to venture a guess as to where from exactly–and also tall.  Dori had never seen an Asian chick who was taller than she was till now.  She was also bald.  Two long, partially green-dyed locks of hair just in front of her ears suggested that it was an intentional shave rather than chemo or something.  Her baldness wasn’t the only thing that made her look like a chemo patient, either; she was wearing sweats, and she was really thin.  She looked more than a little bit sick in fact.  She wasn’t too skinny to have a nice set of tits though.  Dori noted with absent interest that the chick wasn’t wearing a bra, and her tits were real.

From what she could hear by eavesdropping from the counter, they had just met each other; the conversation was in that feeling-out phase common to all early-stage relationships.  They were talking jobs and other light stuff like that.  Dori drifted off into her own head before long, imagining that he was a Vietnam vet talking to the chick who’s rescued him from a POW cage.  He had never met her until now, and he was showing her what American culture was all about.  Of course it was silly, since neither of them was old enough to have been in Vietnam, but it kept her occupied.

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