Sam Valentine - The Knight of Cups - 1.0

The bright blue Vespa puttered through the early morning alley called Buchanan Way, stopping in back of a broad garage-style door with a sign saying Serpentine Motors. Somewhere a cat complained about the scraps offered in the dumpster behind Moe Joe Pork’s BBQ Cafe. A crow disputed with a seagull over the corpse of a roof rat. The smell of the city began to awaken.

The heat of the day wouldn’t arrive for hours, and Sam wore a business suit that made the pre-dawn chill bearable. The suit was tailored to her proportions but retained a masculine-style. Her black Oxfords had two-inch heels, though, and her mustache was drawn-on with eyebrow pencil. She wore a gray motorcycle helmet which she pulled off as soon as her scooter stopped moving.

Kicking the sidestand lever down, she dismounted, hanging her helmet on a handlebar and brushing her fingers through her short hair. She produced a ring of keys from a jacket pocket and used them to open a smaller door beside the large roll-up. Stepping inside, she surveyed the dark shapes of work in progress. Snake, the tattooed mechanic who ran the place, would not open until 7 a.m.

A dim light marked the top of a flight of stairs leading to Snake’s apartment but nothing moved or made a sound in the wide room. Satisfied, Sam stepped back into the alley and pulled the Vespa inside the door, walking backward and towing the scooter by the handlebars. Back outside in the night alley, she relocked the doors, stooping briefly to examine what might be a scuff mark on her pants cuff.

Then she climbed an exterior stairway to a door marked 774-1/2, where more keys opened the three locks to let her inside her apartment. She walked through the place, turning on lights, discarding her keys into a bowl on a table by the door and her suit jacket across the barbell rack in front of a padded bench. She toed her shoes off then bent to pull off black socks which she tucked inside the shoes.

Humming tunelessly, she proceeded toward a short hall, unbuckling her gun rig as she approached a file cabinet. The shoulder belt, holster and 9mm pistol went inside the top drawer after removing the magazine and checking that there was no cartridge in the chamber.

In the hall, she shrugged off her suspenders and shimmied out of her gray pants, revealing her boxer-style briefs, decorated with hearts of various sizes. Leaving the pants where they fell, she unbuttoned her dress shirt and dropped it just outside the bathroom door. Her white sports bra minimized her breasts until she pulled it off over her head like a t-shirt.

The boxers hit the floor, too, just before she stepped inside the shower stall, turning both taps to full, and meeting the chill stream with her face turned up, her mouth open and eyes closed. She gargled some of the water and spit it out into the drain, then soaped herself all over before using a polyester bath lily to scrub with. The mustache came off when she rubbed it with first the bar of soap then her fingers.

Her nipples had stood up with the cold water but relaxed in the warming spray, and she gave them only a cursory wipe with a terrycloth rag before ending her shower with another blast of cold water after turning off the hot.

“Woo!” she breathed, enjoying the head rush and the crinkly feeling as her nipples reacted again. The cold water shut off, too; she stepped out onto the bath mat and wrapped herself in a huge bath towel, decorated with the image of a white and orange cartoon dog. Ten minutes later, she crawled in between her sheets in her little cubby of a bedroom and was asleep when her phone rang just after seven.

She had to get up and go find it while it rang disconsolately. She had left it in her pants pocket on the living room floor. Retrieving the instrument, she confirmed her identity and checked to see who might be calling her before she’d even had her coffee.

Not a number she recognized but not flagged as spam, either, so she answered as curtly as she could. “Valentine,” she said, affirming her identity.

“Snake gave me this number,” said a soft voice.

“I’ll kill Snake later,” Sam promised. “Who is this?”