Pretty Paper
Part Eight
By Missy

SERIES: Pretty Paper
PART: 8 of About 10
RATING: R (Adult themes and materials, violent material)
PAIRING(s): Rhonda/Squiggy; Lenny/Laverne; Eddie Izzard/Shirley (Hold the questions a bit, just hold onto them ;-)
DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Kai, Myself and FG so far; any other archives are welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact. send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully. Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of search engine. Please do not submit my work to a search engine that picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as "Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive, or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made of my work!
CATEGORY: Drama
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SETTING IN TIMELINE: Post-Playing The Roxie. AU cannon after that.
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Squiggy's Lodge gives him a birthday gift that he'll never forget, while Laverne and Lenny meet a man whose unusual behavior makes an impression on Shirley.
NOTES: Started a week before Chesyre's birthday. Squiggy as a hero is so rarely done.

The idea of strippers being raffled off to members of a lodge or fraternity is possibly an urban legend, but I got it from the painfully antiquated "Things You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask". Be happy I edited out the part about the donkey ;-)

Eddie Izzard is a cross-dressing British comedian. I am not transporting him to the '50's through some magical timewarp, nor is the overtly AU or Magicfic. Instead I've composited a lot of Eddie's RL behavior and attitudes and stuff from his routines and placed him within the '50's backdrop of repressive Milwaukee. So it's sort of RP AU fic. No snideness. Send me questions if you have them. In the words of Mister Izzard: "Good, I hope you're coming along with this".

This fic was beta-tested by Ande, for your protection!

***

For Cheshyre,
On the occasion of her birthday,
For forgiving me for starting that whole Matt/Jeff Hardy incest ball rolling.

****

"I swear, Laverne, this was where he said he was goin'!"

Laverne crossed her arms across her breast, jaywalking away from the courthouse to put as much distance between herself and Lenny. "Oh yeah? Then where is he?"

"I dunno! The news just said they took in a greasy bum and a tall blonde girl. I figured the greasy bum was the pimp, but when I went to th' mourge, but Squig wasn't on the slab, so's I came to get you!"

"That all you came to my place for, Len?" She asked.

"Yeah! Waitaminute!" He closed the distance between them, so that he could lower his voice. "Ya think I came cause I wanna...ya know?"

"Yeah!"

"In the middle of the day?!"

"Why not?"

"Cause that ain't right! I don't do that with pretty girls like you?"

"What did ya do with the ugly ones, Len? Drop 'em in the street, like Rhonda?"

She had gone too far. He felt it, and she knew it.

"Vernie...anythin' I did last night was cause I wanted to be close to ya. Because I love ya."

She winced.

"Ya still don't love me?"

"Len, I..."

He shook his head. "Vernie. Ya gave me..." He blushed, turned up his collar. The words came in a whisper. "We did everything I ever wanted, and ya still don't love me?"

"I didn't say I don't love ya."

"Then..."

"Len, this happened real quick. I got a lot to think about." She wrapped her arms around him, and they came to a stand-still. "We gotta take it slower, Len. It's new now, you and me. And I dunno what's goin' on."

"That ain't a no."

"It ain't." She squeezed the hand hidden in his pocket. "Let's try the library."

She pulled him down the street, running down the cool streets as they had so many days before.

***

This was turning into a habit.

Shirley brushed her dark hair backward, facing the...twilight?

She shot out of bed, thoughts racing through her mind. How had she ended in the bed? She remembered starting something with Eddie on a chair, finishing in the shower, but nothing about a bed.

How in the world had this happened? Was she turning into Laverne?

She laughed at the idea, resting against flattened, foamy pillows. No; whatever Laverne and Lenny were doing, it didn't have anything to do with what she and Eddie were doing.

Eddie. She realized, suddenly, that she was alone again. Her eyes lazily scanned the table for a note, found one, and plucked it casually from its place in an ashtray, reading aloud.

"Shirley,

I'm shipping out.

Eddie."

She froze. It seemed like a cruel joke, but the paper felt all too real beneath her hands.

In a moment, she was dressed and running toward the pier.

***

Squiggy's eyes crossed beneath the extensive, voluminous words of the book of torts. He didn't understand absolutely everything, but a few words popped out at him.

Sweat pearled upon his forehead, entangling with his hair worm. He refused to cave into his instincts and just close it, give up, and go look for some colorful moths. Rhonda's life swung in the balance, and he would do anything to save it.

At random, he closed the book and picked up a police procedural, then flipped it. "Eeny Meeny Miney Moe..." He muttered, and randomly slammed his hand down on an open page.

He groaned. That part was about blood arcs.

Blood Arcs...those big red stains he had seen on the brick face of the Pizza Bowl!

Heedlessly, he ripped the page out of the book and ran from the library.

"Watchit!" he shouted, pushing over a man and running down an empty street, heading for the courthouse.

"Squiggy!" Lenny whispered to Laverne, and the pursuit began.

***

"All Rise."

Rhonda stared straight ahead, her orange jumpsuit making her nondescript. She could be headed in on any charges. She watched the judge lower his glasses, look into her face and then read from the charges.

"Be seated."

The courtroom filled with the sound of shuffling chairs.

"Miss Lee, you have been charged in the murder of one Mister John Wicker. How do you plead?"

She stood, determination reflected in her expression. Her attorney tried to rise, but she would not be spoken for in such an important matter.

"Guilty, your honor."




TBC

Chapter 7
Chapter 9