CHAPTER 1
Visiting Hours
"Square Jane, you wanna li'l action on this? It's from Colorado," whispered Zeela Matta, a zaftig Haitian woman in her early forties. Her kind eyes and soft smile exuded an air of confidence and congenitally.
"Ki sa se bon, pomee-sha," Zeela continued in her thick accent as she extended her arm, offering a half-smoked joint to Lulu Norris.
"No thanks, I just had some Thai stick with my Chinese buffet," Lulu muttered sarcastically, her green eyes sparkled despite her depressive tone.
"Oh, Square Jane, you gettin' funny," Zeela mused on in her broken Haitian Creole accent.
"In here, anything sounds funny," Lulu said as she looked past the cold concrete walls of what she dubbed the "Grey Bar Hotel."
Lulu was longing to get back to her seemingly normal life. She was beginning to lose all faith in her mouthpiece that had sworn six ways to Sunday on his gray crocodile Armani attaché that he would waltz through the door at exactly the right moment to save her ass. Lulu, wearing a neon-tangerine cotton jumper certainly didn't miss the mornings and the hours spent obsessing over which respectable suit to wear. The orange jumpsuit played against Lulu's long, thick, auburn hair and fair complexion as she sat in the elevated salon chair.
"You ain't a fish no mo', but you definitely still fresh meat in here; ain't she sha?" Zeela asked, eyeing Lulu up and down, holding a pair of pink and silver thinning shears in her large right hand and the marijuana cigarette in the other, motioning for Lulu to grab it.
Zeela had a comfortable and carefree manner about herself. In the short amount of time Lulu had known her, she had grown to admire and respect her honest ways.
Sharing memories of her family back home in Haiti, Zeela's stories always began with the family gathered around a pot of vegetable stew, or legim, how Zeela referred to it, and always ended with someone having too much sugarcane spiced rum to drink. Then there were the devastatingly sad stories of the earthquake destroying everything but the clothes on her family's backs. Zeela would tell these stories a lot, because deep down she still felt a sense of remorse that at the time of the earthquake she wasn't by her family's side. Instead, she was vacationing in New Orleans with her cousin. It was her first time in the United States and a trip she had planned for what seemed like a lifetime. Zeela never felt so far away and helpless.
And it was on that trip that Zeela met an oh-so-charming Haitian man who, unbeknownst to her, was in trouble with the law, stashing an obscene amount of cocaine in her hotel room. When the cops finally found him there, they arrested both Zeela and her new love.
The past five years had been tortuous for Zeela in the Grey Bar, unable to be there for her loved ones in the critical rebuilding of their decimated homes and neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince.
Zeela's smooth, ebony skin glowed against the fluorescent lights that were hung cockeyed throughout the makeshift salon. Her hair, loosely gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck, held together only by a pencil.
"With all your book fans you need your own talk show, apparently," said Ingrid Kokono, sporting a freshly cut, ruby red bob and speaking in a wiser-than-thou, broken Russian accent.
Ingrid was known as the Kapayna, Russian for commander, a moniker she was quite fond of ever since she was brought to the facility in the early nineties.
In her former life, Ingrid had been involved in one of the largest white collar cases in Wall Street history. She easily might have been a breakout Internet mogul along the lines of Meg Whitman from eBay if it hadn't been for her greed and the mystique of illegal activities that drew her toward a life of crime.
Ingrid found solace in the underground world through her interconnected web of Muscovite nightclub contacts. It wasn't until after she earned her degree from a university in St. Petersburg that she turned to a life of automated crime. She eventually turned herself in out of fear of a KGB reprisal, and she has been running the salon efficiently ever since.
It was just then that Davio Spinoza burst through the heavy aluminum double doors. Looking like he came out of an audition for Glee, decked out in a preppy argyle sweater with a purple collared shirt underneath, neatly tucked into his khaki pants. Davio was Lulu's hired gun and longtime gal pal.
"Girl, we gonna get you out of here. There is a sample sale at Barneys next week," sang Davio as he plopped down on the salon chair next to Lulu, slowly opening his infamous Armani attaché. "We are getting you out of here this week."
"I'll settle for my thirtieth birthday," joked Lulu.
"They didn't tell me two," Ingrid interrupted, addressing Davio. "Princess, are we cutting your hair also?"
"No thanks, honey, I gave at the office," Davio chirped.
"Lulu, your hair look like auburn waterfall. We should cut for Locks of Love," Ingrid demanded in a Russian rapid-fire tone.
"Yeah, just give me a Miley Cyrus, cut it all off," said Lulu. "Girlfriend, have you lost your fucking mind?" shrieked Davio, snapping a tiny pair of pinking shears in Lulu's direction.
"Clearly. I'm locked up, with no end to this nightmare in sight," said Lulu, as she turned toward Zeela.
"Girl, I know this ain't what you're used to; this gonna take a while. I got a seventy-two Conair, 850 watts, but more than half of them don't work, so we workin' wit' 410 watts of mystifying, stupefying, hair-drying love," mused Zeela.
If Zeela had one thing, it was a sense of humor, a trait that Lulu truly adored. In her book, anyone that could make her laugh under such duress deserved her respect and equally earned her trust.
Humming a Zydeco tune, Zeela began cutting a four-inch swath off of Lulu's soft curls. "Your book fans are going to set you free, Square Jane. They love your pretty, little white ass."
"No. No. I am going to get you out of here," exclaimed Davio, pushing back his gingersnap red highlights.
"I've heard that before," Lulu replied.
"Mm-hmm, ain't that the truth," Zeela chimed in.
"I may not be the best lawyer in town, but I certainly sleep with the best. And I have something that will settle the score, wherever that bitch is hiding," Davio confessed.
* * *
"If you don't mind me saying, you seem a little too egotistical to kill yourself lady," said the fair-haired, Irish paramedic as he monitored his patient from inside the cozy yet crowded ambulance.
"You would think," Lizette Hansen muttered under her breath, her mousy brown coif had seen better days. But in her own subjective opinion, seeing her reflection in the EMT's silver dial of the stethoscope, she thought she looked pretty damn good for a post-menopausal,...
