Lysergically Yours | Page 7

bed," she said, kicking the door closed, "It may not have been necessary, but you can never be too careful."
-=five=-
Johnny woke up to the sound of typing. His first thought was the same as his first thought every morning: "Where am I?" In my room, good. Now who's typing on my computer? The events of the previous night replayed quickly in his mind. Tinka. He opened his eyes: "Whatcha doing?"
She was sitting naked at his desk, the second bottle of wine half-empty between her knees: "Reading your Internet history files."
Like a shot, Johnny was bolt upright in his bed: "What?!"
"Don't get your panties in a bunch," Tinka laughed, "Best way in the world to get to know someone, saves us a lot of trouble. You shouldn't talk about drugs on MSN though, and you certainly shouldn't track your drug-dealing profits in a spreadsheet."
Defensive now, Johnny said: "It's not like I labeled the columns Cocaine and Marijuana."
"Yeah, but what else could it possibly be. Four hundred units at two dollars fifty purchased. Thirty-one units overhead. Three hundred and sixty nine units at five dollars sold. Eight hundred and forty-five dollars gross profits. Good luck convincing a judge you're talking about magazine subscriptions."
"Listen," Johnny said, "I know what I'm doing."
He picked up his pants from the floor and retrieved his cell phone from the pocket, "If I call the phone number for this room..." He did so as he was talking and the phone on the desk started ringing. Tinka reached for it automatically but Johnny stopped her: "Don't answer it"
The phone rang three times and then an answering machine picked up. "I'm not here. You know what to do." said Johnny's voice.
"You hear that?" Johnny said, "That's the computer. The computer answers the land-line and takes messages like an ordinary answering machine, but if I enter an access code," he punched fifteen digits into the keypad of his cell-phone and the computer emitted a single DING, "I get remote access to a special command mode. From this point I can wipe out every file on my hard disk by pressing three buttons." He pressed three buttons and Tinka's eyebrows shot up.
"Those weren't them," Johnny said with a laugh, "that was the exit code."
"Very clever," Tinka congratulated him, "unless the enemy fucks you and then reads your files while you're sleeping"
"It's Canada," Johnny shrugged, "no-one goes to that much effort to put someone like me in jail."
Tinka suddenly started rummaging around on Johnny's floor until she found her handbag. "Here" she said "I'll cast a spell for you. What do you want most in the world?"
"Right now?"
"Yes, right now."
To have a fucking clue what's going on for once, Johnny had to bite his tongue to keep himself from saying. Giving the question a bit more thought he realized he didn't have a clue what he wanted. If he had been answering the question honestly the day before, he might have said sex. That morning though he felt that there was very little he was actually wanting for. Excepting, of course, money. He had known from the day he enrolled that his savings wouldn't carry him through more than a few months. He had been trying out a few leads on some easy money and though promising, they weren't delivering at the rate he had hoped. Right then, Johnny had a lot more than he cared to admit riding on the possibility that he could get back into the acid game. If that fell through, he would find himself in the position before Christmas of having to, for the first time in his life, get a real job.
"It's crass," he admitted to Tinka at last, "but probably money."
Tinka was in the process of pulling things out of her handbag and placing them on Johnny's desk, She stopped and narrowed her eyes at him: "I thought you were a drug dealer."
"You assumed," Johnny said, happy to have some evidence that he wasn't the only person in the world who could be caught off guard.
"Whatever. How much money?"
"Not much. Not like the lottery or anything, you know, just like a steady supply of cash I don't have to work too hard for."
She ripped a sheet of paper out of one of the notebooks on Johnny's desk and began to doodle with a pencil for a few minutes. When at last she was satisfied there was a simple yet evocative glyph drawn in the centre of the page.
"Give me your hand," she said in a suddenly commanding voice as she poured a small pool of white paint onto the corner of his desk from out of a jar that must have come from her bag.
Before he was even aware he was doing so, Johnny had stretched his left hand out towards her. She grabbed a hold