Worry turns to sheer panic as World Surf League SVP of Tours, Head of Competition, appears to still be in Rio de Janeiro drinking poolside lemon drops with promising J-Bay event less than 24-hours away!

– Moved from Shakira article.

Apologies to KVF

Meanwhile, in Brazil…

“The American woman seems angry, Senhor.” whispered Benedito. “Oh… she gets like that towards the evening Bene.” said Aleixo, wearily. Besides, he thinks she’s Australian, but can’t be bothered to correct Bene. He’d seen most things, he felt, in his 28 year stint at this beachside hotel. Comings and goings, groanings and cummings. Mostly perpetrated by louche and revolting foreigners who liked to treat him and the too-often changing staff with contempt.

“It’s a living.” he would say to his bar buddies for the millionth time. “And I get a free house. Sometimes the tips are good, and the drugs they forget or leave before going back to the airport have helped pay for Martina’s schooling and medical bills.”

His salt and pepper hair seemed to gain a new frosting this week, as the particular American / Australian in question rattled around the mostly empty salmon-pink stucco pseudo-hacienda (4-stories of bad carpets) and brought new levels of terror to what was usually a quiet shoulder season. This ‘DUBBYOO-ESS-ELL’ had scared off most of the regulars, or booked them out. For very little return. A few noisy Gringos and a mountain of equipment, all paid for seemingly by a be-spectacled man who Aleixo and the other staff didn’t trust for a reason that none of them could pin down. Something… too shiny. Too many teeth. Like the skin-devils that emerge from the jungles of his grandparents stories. Wearing a human ‘suit’ and smiling too much. Luring innocents to be consumed in the darkness.

Eventually they had gone. Leaving echoes of shouts and strangely smelling blocks of wax in little cardboard boxes found under the beds. Benedito thought they might be candles but found no wick. He tried anyway and set fire to one of the staff break tables out back, as the melting puddle went up in a cloud of charred fake coconut stench.

Pressing handfuls of colourful plastic stickers into people’s bewildered hands, they vanished. Aleixo tried to patch a leaking hose with the sticky vinyl but it failed instantly and the scraps still lay in the dirt of the west garden bed under the kitchen ventilation.

Gone, all but one, he thought bitterly. This woman was an odd cling-on to his existence and more demanding by the day. It had been a week and 3 staff had quit over her behaviour. Drinking steadily from the time she emerged about midday, to ‘rest’ by the pool while a cacophony of various modern Euro-disco hammerings belted from a lumpy mustard coloured portable speaker connected to her phone. Incoming messages or notifications bleeped into the mix, usually off-beat, and provided opportunities for her to alternately wail, shout curses words, cackle, weep or sing maudlinly. All the while the bottles and glasses accumulated by her lounge chair or were flung into the bushes, to be quietly retrieved later in the early hours. Aleixo felt it a miracle that they always got all the broken pieces of glass before she cut herself. He shivered, imagining the trouble that would cause.

Today, she seemed particularly wild-eyed. Bellowing for harder drinks than usual and groping the female servers enough that they all refused to attend and walked off in protest. “We’ll come back when SHE has gone Aleixo!!! We love you as our boss but enough is enough!!!” He didn’t blame them.

Benedito was slim, softly-spoken with large dark eyes. Aleixo noticed her confusion when Bene served her. She seemed to wobble in place , and half-heartedly reach out before snarling and muttering something violent and unknown before tilting the drink towards her reddened face.

As the evening wore on and her disco became louder, she stalked around the pool, shaking her fist at imagined slights, and kicking sun loungers into the water. Around ten pm, after refusing a meal (running up to the cart and hurling the plate over the wall into the Philodendrons below) she suddenly stopped her pacing and shouted “I want BITCHES!!!”

Aleixo and Bene stopped their card game and looked confusedly at each other. “What does she mean, Alex?” Benedito looked worried. “Hmmmmm…” Aleixo sighed and levered himself slowly off the stool to go investigate, taking a circular bar tray as a shield.

As he approached the pool, strung with coloured lights between the palm trees, he found her with an odd spread-legged stance, knees akimbo, arms out, wobbling as he did once on his nephew’s green plastic skateboard before careening into a fence and splitting his lip. She swivelled her focus to him and spat “WOMEN! I want WOMEN! NOW. HERE!”

Aleixo tilted his head and cast his eyes about as if searching for the answer. “BITCHES!” she shouted again, straightening up towards him and grabbing her crotch lewdly, thrusting her hips while scrunching her face in a violent bulge-eyed grimace. She reached into a pile of clothes and threw a wad of dollars at him, which opened up in air and fluttered down at his feet. “Ah… OK. One moment please Madame.” Without touching money, Alex held up his hand, then his index finger as he turned and walked away, tray tucked neatly under his arm. The prostitutes a street over will be willing to indulge this women, he thought. With any luck drag her away for an adventure and get her locked up while they split the contents of her pockets with the policia. He might be able to put a word in with his cousin at the magistrates to get her deported, or at least kicked out of town.

He told Benedito what was happening and half jogged around the corner to find a few working girls to amuse the hideous Gringo. He didn’t care about her tastes. It’s Brazil, and his sister liked girls also. Although their parents did not know that yet. He hoped his wife’s cousin Maria was not working tonight. It would be awkward to speak about at the next family gathering, and he was not sure what this louco woman was capable of.

When he arrived back at the poolside with six of the prostitutes he convinced to come save his hotel from being demolished by a singular guest, he found her waist deep in the pool, topless. Waving a half-empty bottle of rum she screeched with joy and waded slowly towards the steps. Benedito shrugged helplessly and made a motion with his eyes that Aleixo couldn’t decipher through the glare of the lights.

She chuckled deeply and prowled up the steps and out of the the water, to sashay past the lineup of ‘girls’, stroking their faces one by one.

Aleixo did not know what particular body type his irksome client would like, so he had explained to them that he would make selection of ‘flavours’ and come back if she demanded more of the same. Some were disappointed not to get picked. The potential money was the key, not the details of the service.

He watched dispassionately as she perused the offerings. Hoping that he could just go home sooner than normal and get some sleep before attending to the bombsite in the morning.

The woman smiled and laughed and took the tallest, most lithesome one in the lineup by the hand and led her towards the pool edge. ‘Tina’ was how he knew her. She attended mass three rows along from his family most Sundays.

The others muttered but O Louco, as he thought of her now, shook her head smiling as the lights shone up from the chlorinated waters, casting a sickly green hue to her face, and motioned that they were all to come into the pool too. As they discarded purses, clothes and shoes, talking amongst themselves cheerfully and entered the pool, the woman suddenly grabbed Tina’s hair and plunged her arm-deep under water. She struggled, clawing and fighting to come back up but this crazy drunken lady was too strong and held her firmly while the others shrieked and panicked. Aleixo turned to run for the policia but out of the shadows stepped a man with a handgun and a large hunting knife. “No. Let’s all stay here and have some fun.” The voice was smooth and familiar. As the lights moved in the breeze they revealed the grinning face of the toothy shiny man. Eyes twinkling behind his glasses, he motioned for Aleixo to turn and see the sight of the laughing woman, bottle in hand, running from out of the dark shrubbery. Her feet making slapping sounds before leaping sideways and onto dead Tina’s floating body. One foot landing on her crotch and the other bracing against her chin, causing the corpse to move a couple of feet further into the pool before her shrieking rider fell off giggling. Like a skimming board, Aleixo thought numbly. Like my Aunt Louisa gave to our little Pedro last summer.

Aleixo felt the gun press into his spine as the shiny man said “move.”
The woman surfaced and hurled the bottle at the remaining women who were huddled together on the deck, crying softly and shaking. He suddenly saw Benedito was face down over a deck chair, a dark liquid pooling around him, his head at an odd angle.

A sudden blow to Aleixo’s head caused loud red spark in his eyes and a sickening wave of pain that forced him to his knees, then face down onto the wet concrete.

As his vision faded he saw the toothy man jam the knife deep into a palm tree and rip Benedito’s uniform pants down with his free hand before fumbling to drop his own shorts, revealing a wobbling erection. He shouted “The judges say that was only a THREE POINT TWO JayJay! You gonna hop on the ski and re-set?!? Do you need a new board?!?!“

Then blackness and silence enveloped him.

I’m panicking so hard that I’ll have to put off about 99.9% of the panic for later. Don’t wanna blow my load of panic too quickly.