Inside the Toledo roller rink, a shiny disco ball turned and a handful of people of all skill levels circled around counterclockwise in regular skates and roller blades. Hand in hand, Kip and Charlene sped by and let go just in time to synchronously rotate and roll backwards with deftness to a classic 80s song that was probably playing for the first time when they were teens. They joined hands again while going backwards like a tight ice figure skating pair and then he turned her as if she was about to go into a pirouette, but she made a regular turn and loop without leaving the ground. The song ended and they made for an exit. They stopped at a tall upright table where they had left their 16 oz sodas.

            “I can’t believe we still know how to do that,” said Charlene.

            “You were always the perfect partner, Chazz,” said Kip.

            “Shut up. You’re the one that taught me how to skate.”

            “Then you were the perfect student,” he replied.

            “You were going to tell me about, you know…”

            Kip slurped his soda and said, “Not with soft drinks.”

            “Night club?” Charlene said with glee.

            “Okay, got any suggestions?”

            “Two nights ago, I was at this place that plays the best techno Euro trash music. I think it would be perfect,” she says.

            Kip laughed. “Lead the way.”

After hailing another cab and arriving at the front of a club called “Kalashnikov’s,” Kip and Charlene were led back to a booth in a club with pulsing night music of the Eastern Europe block variety. Kip looked around warily, expecting too-cool Russians with vodka on their breaths to sneak up behind them and push AK-47s into their backs, but none were to be seen. Or, at least, none that weren’t dancing terribly under the influence or hiding in booths snorting coke. Or… whatever else in lieu of chain-smoking deprivation under modern regulations.

            “Bottle of Stoli and ice,” said Charlene to the one who seated them, to which the man replied, “Otlichnyy,” which Kip translated in his head from his time spent in Moscow, to “Excellent” if not “Cool.”

            “I never realized Toledo had this kind of a night scene,” said Kip.

            “Me either,” replied Charlene.

            “Excellent choice, Chazz.”

            Charlene smiled and said, “Okay, I’ve waited long enough to hear the story. How did you wind up in sexy stilettos and weapon discovery? Something about a barfight?”

            “Okay, okay. ’Bout a year after high school, I was having my preferred drink as you now well know, and I got up to put a few quarters into the juke box to play Angel by Aerosmith and a guy hassled me. He called me a ‘dwarf’ and said to get out of his way. I wasn’t even in his way. He crossed the room to get in my way, obviously to try picking a fight.”

            “So, what’d you do?” asked Charlene.

            “I told him to get out of ‘MY WAY’.”

            Charlene shared a sly grin and took another sip of her vodka. “Bet that went over well.”

            “Uh, yeah, I was just getting to that. He called me ‘A stupid little dwarf’ again and I was in no mood. My pet chinchilla Marty had just died.”

            “Oh, poor Marty. I remember him,” she said.

            “Yeah, little fucker was my only friend after you went away to college. I was drinking to his memory.”

            “I remember how you saved all your tips as the gas station’s car wash attendant to get him. What an idiot that guy was to mess with you on a day like that,” Charlene interjected.

Stepping up to the table, the man who’d seated them arrived with a bottle of Stolichnaya and two whiskey-sized glasses with ice.

            “Spasibo,” said Charlene to the man.

            “Na zdrovie,” replied the man, and then left.

            “Allow me,” said Kip as he removed the lid and poured vodka up to the top of the level of the ice in each glass, then set the bottle back down. “Vashe zdarovje,” he said raising his glass.

            “Vashay-dzarohvyay,” Charlene replied, attempting to follow his precise pronunciation, but doing so poorly.”

They each took a sip and set their glasses back down.

            “The Jack side of my liver is not going to like this clear stuff,” said Kip.

            “You’ve spent time in Russia,” Charlene said, almost somberly.

            “It shows?” he said, smiling at what he felt was a compliment.

            “Yeah. You’ll have to tell me more about that sometime, but you were saying about the juke box and that idiot?”

            “Right, I was still wearing those ‘clunky old cowboy boots’ as you called them, and they only really gave me an inch and a quarter, but the heel was still strong enough to stomp on the asshole’s tennis shoe (and he was standing behind me, breathing down my neck, waiting for a response at the time). I took my right boot to his right shoe and he screamed as I spun around and clocked him in the jaw. He lost an incisor and I cut my hand in the process, but no one, and I mean no one, makes fun of my height.”

            “I know,” she said, her right eyebrow raised. “I mean, I gathered. I noticed most of your marks are over six-feet-tall. Is that a coincidence?”

            “Not entirely,” said Kip, taking a sip of his vodka. “I don’t only pick jobs that are tall, but I kind of got a reputation for treating giants with ‘extreme prejudice’.” He made eye contact with Charlene. “That why you picked too-tall Tycho as a mark for me?”

            “Partially,” she said. “But how’d you get from the bar fight to…” she waved her glass towards his feet.

            “Right, well, the asshole limped his way to his car, but it wasn’t over, unfortunately for him. He tried to follow me home to get revenge, but I doubled around and he eventually lost interest and went home himself. Now that I knew where he lived, I bided my time. The whole ‘dwarf’ reference got me to thinking. Save painful bone extending surgeries, my height was my lot in life unless I got proactive.”

            “And if there’s one thing my Kip’s always been, that’s been proactive,” Charlene said with a giggle. Kip wondered how many vodka and sodas she’d had before he’d even initially come down from the fifth floor.

            “Yeah, I guess so,” Kip said with a bit of satisfaction. “So, the next day I went to the Sears.”

            “You were still in Memphis?” She asked.

            “Yeah, mom was still there at the diner and needed looking after.”

Kip’s mother struggled from pill popping the way some suffered from alcoholism. She took uppers by night and downers by day due to her irregular shift schedule and always had since he could remember. He had check on her during the day when he got home from school to make sure she hadn’t taken too many downers. Kip counted her pills assiduously. He hadn’t talked about it to anyone, but Charlene had come home with him one day and, having spied him in the bathroom counting her pills, put the pieces together when he saw her passed out on the couch. After he’d finished, he’d led Chazz outside and said, “Let’s go to your house.”

            “I remember,” said Charlene, urging him to continue. “So, the Sears?”

            “Yeah, I went to the shoe department…the women’s shoe department. I tried on a size 12 heel and the rest is history.”

            “Oh, c’mon, you don’t just try on a heel and wind up in Versace a few years later,” Charlene set her glass down on the table and crossed her arms in front of her, as if she’d been denied a particularly juicy story and wasn’t going to stand for it.

            “Okay, okay.” Kip raised his voice over the still pounding music. “I went back to the guy’s house and waited in my piece of shit car you know I had back then until he got home from work. I was wearing these ugly beige 3-inch-heels I’d found. He stepped out of his I’m-so-limp-I-got-a-giant-American-flag-on-a-pole-propped-up-in-the-bed-of-my-pickup-truck and I stepped out too. For once I felt like I had a normal height for a man at a good 5’7” and I felt empowered. Certainly stronger than if I had a stupid flag pole and a monster pickup truck.” Kip paused for a moment to gather his thoughts and took a swig of his vodka.

Charlene scooted back into the booth like she was reading a good novel, pulling her thighs into her stomach, as he continued the tale.

            “So, he didn’t notice me at first. My car was parked across the street. I was still getting used to the heels, but I hobbled a bit over and before he reached his front door I said, ‘You were looking for me?’ He looked at me and didn’t recognize me at first, but then his eyes went down towards my feet and he saw the heels. He said, ‘Oh yeah, it’s the dwarf…or should I say, queer’.”

            “OMG, Kip. Did he get that he was about to be so dead? Go on!” Charlene’s eyes lit up as she said the last two words.

            “I’m getting to that,” Kip said with an indulgent smile. “But it’s not what you think. This time I stomped on his tennis shoes with a heel. He screamed, but the heel broke and my ankle crumpled with it. Now I only had one heel on and a useless shoe on a twisted ankle. The tall idiot dragged his foot behind him and inside the door, tripping as he went, but clearly determined. He was obviously going towards a weapon, and I wasn’t sure what kind, but could only guess it was a gun due to his truck and flag sentiment.”

Kip paused to take a sip of vodka and sighed. “I wasn’t in much better shape, and I fell not far from where he did inside the house’s entryway landing. I stretched out and caught hold of his ankle before he could fully stand up and he fell again. What ensued was a battle of slaps, punches and grabs before he got free of my grasp and hopped into the bedroom and slid open a closet door.”

Charlene nervously twisted at the tie on her skirt. 

Kip continued. “By the time I got into the closet, he had the heel of a snub nose in his hand and was starting to rotate towards me. I ducked just in time as he pulled the trigger and it hit the bedroom wall near the door where my head had just been. I lunged for his legs and took them out before he could fire again. We fought for what seemed like minutes until his gun was knocked across the room and I found myself removing my good heel and striking his face over and over again until the heel went through his ear and into his brain.”

Charlene gasped, her eyes popping out stunned, not sure if she should laugh.

Kip said, “I didn’t really know what I’d done until I tasted the blood in my mouth and realized I was still beating him with my fists long after the heel had done its ultimate work. I later remembered I popped out one of his eyes too at some point. It was like time had stopped and I could only hear the beating of the pulse in my brain. I stood up on my aching ankle, but I knew that I could walk, and I gathered my thoughts about me. I had to get out of there quickly, figuring that someone must have heard the gun shot. I pulled the heel out of the asshole’s head and collected the broken one from the landing. I grabbed a plastic bag out of the guy’s kitchen and put them inside. I pulled my sleeve over my hand and wiped off the cabinet knob and then wiped the door knob of the front door as I closed it on my way out. Never touched his gun. Wearing only pantyhose and barefoot, the bag at my side, I kept my eyes on the ground and crossed the street to my car, got inside and drove calmly to my mom’s house to plot my next move. I didn’t notice until I got home that I had blood splattered across my face.”

            “Whoa, that was your first kill?” Charlene asked, stunned.

            “No, my first was a guy in kindergarten,” said Kip with a smile to cut the tension. “Of course, monster-truck guy was. I didn’t even know I was capable of it until it after happened either.”

            “Yeah. I know the feeling,” she said, as if remembering her first kill and then shaking off the memory.

            “So, the genesis of these,” Kip said, using his glass to gesture to his feet, “I went out and researched me some drag queen stompers with steel-reinforced heels so that botched job would never happen again, and, in the process of my new-found aptitude for wet work, I eventually made contact with a guy who knew how to customize any fashion element like these little titanium beauties.”

            “They didn’t have to be Versace though,” she said.

            “Or Jimmy Choo,” he replied. “But that’s what I like. You know, like I’m sure you have a favorite facial hair maker.”

            “Oh, not just facial,” she said. “I could tell when you first saw me that you didn’t like my short new do. At least, it’s new compared to how you remembered me from senior year.”

            “I never said…”

            “You didn’t have to,” she finished his sentence as she reached over to her handbag next to her in the booth.

Kip looked at her a little nervously and she noticed.

“Don’t worry,” she said, pausing, “I don’t have a weapon in it besides pepper spray and I’m not going for that.” She moved again and caught hold of the bag and pulled out a long blonde wig and set it on top of her short wavy brown hair, moving it into place. “Like it?”

            “It looks so much like…”

            “It used to?” she replied.

            “It does,” said Kip.

            “Yeah. It’s not bad is it. I had Estelle’s of New Orleans make it from the hair I actually cut that summer after we graduated. It was expensive as hell, but I used my graduation money. It’s more than proved its worth. I don’t know how many times switching wigs has saved my ass over the past few years.”

            “Methinks you can say that again,” Kip said, finishing his last sip of vodka. 

            “Ya think? Another?” asked Charlene, as if reading his mind.

            Kip nodded, but wasn’t sure if he was ready to get completely plastered with an old friend he’d just met just a few hours ago after 30 years of silence…especially not one that was armed and skilled in its use.

            “You know what my favorite weapon is?” She said, again apparently inside his head.

            “Whatever’s in your purse,” said Kip his head motioning toward the object.

            Charlene laughed. “No. No, silly. I’ll show you.” She took a swig of vodka.

Kip’s eyes widened like she was going to retrieve a taser from her bra, but she was only reaching to scratch and she followed his eyes to her chest.

            “Oh, stop it,” she said to Kip. “I don’t have it with me. I’m hungry. I know another little place. I’ll show you,” she seemed to be indicating that her favorite weapon would be at the next location.

            He motioned for the check. His real focus, however, was whether the weapon was going to be revealed at this “little place”. Did she mean it literally? A little place would be tight quarters. Perfect for…he shook his head.  He knew paranoia was a hitman’s worst enemy. Kip wondered what she was going to reveal next and if, indeed, he’d be able to handle it.

-----

Charlene and Kip sat and watched as the Benihana chef sliced and diced his way through a New York strip steak and served it up on the side of the knife onto Charlene’s plate.

            “Arigato,” she said with a smile.

            “Arigato,” said the chef, retreating to serve up meat to others seated around his cooking station.

Charlene’s skills with chopsticks while drunk were deplorable, but she was still managing to get a bit of the fried rice, veggies, and steak into her mouth. Kip sipped his sake.

            “You were going to tell me about your favorite weapon,” he said.

            “Oh right,” she said, slurring. “It’s all around you.”

            “Pardon me?” he said.

            “I learned my trade right here every night for the past seven years.”

            “Benihana, Toledo?” Kip said with a smile.

            “No, not Toledo. And not even Benihana. But places like this. The knife, you silly man, the knife, and the Japanese skill thereof.”

            “Say, do you know that old guy in O’Grady’s?” Kip said, making a possible connection.

            “Oh, you mean Haru. Bad news. I hope you didn’t try to mess with him.”

            “No,” said Kip. “I gathered that would be a bad idea judging by the way he was clutching his cane.”

            “Yeah, he’s another reason I came to Toledo. He used to tutor Benihana hopefuls,” she said with a wink. “And he taught me everything I know with knives and swords.” She was slurring worse, but still mostly intelligibly.

            “He and the chefs.” Kip said with a laugh.

Charlene giggled. It was clearly time for Kip to get her out of here and she didn’t take much convincing to finish up and, after he laid down cash and thanked the chef again with another “Arigato,” he propped Charlene up to his side and led her out of the restaurant and into the street for some air she desperately needed.

-----

Back at the hotel, Kip tucked his friend into bed as she protested, “But I’m not tired, Kip. The night is young and you’re so cute and…and…” She lunged up from her waist and kissed Kip on the lips and he smiled. 

“Good night my sweet,” he said. 

She collapsed back, her head falling on her pillow and said, “Kip?”

“Yes, darling,” he replied.

“There’s something I have to tell you about,” she said.

“Oh?”

She was clearly drifting and her eyes fluttered.

“Is it important?”

She didn’t respond. He kissed her on the forehead as she started to snore softly.

-----

Now, back in his room, Kip wondered what he’d gotten himself into. How he’d been led there by her, how she’d charmed her way right back into his heart, and how he could possibly ever shoot her if the time and need came. He, of course, didn’t want to have to kill her, or to even think of her that way, but she killed people for a living. And who could trust a person like that…a person like him?

This was not good news. He’d missed her being around in his life, but this was definitely bad, no matter how he looked at it. He was just about to remove his holster for the night when he heard the click of a card key unlocking the door and his hand moved to his gun, leaning back from the door’s frame. The grinding sound of the door bar lock, a hotel feature that had replaced door chains for guest security, was followed by a pause and then two rather large silencer-muffled gunshots to the hinges. Kip jumped back and away from where the door was about to fall.