Sesame Swallow, Private Investigator
Excerpt from the forthcoming novel
Where I got the name Sesame Swallow, I don’t know, but after writing about her, her adventures and her friends and enemies on and off for the last 10 years, I really decided that she’s wonderful fun, sexy, driven, bolder than is probably good for her health, and decidedly silly at times. She makes me laugh, she makes me sad, but mostly she makes me want to write more and more about her and her adventures, which why I have ten novels planned. It’s true.
So, without further ado, if you mix six parts Nancy Drew and one part Charlie’s Angels, and three parts Californication, you end up with Sesame Swallow, Private Investigator, and a soon-to-be-trending ‘Damsel in a Great Dress’.
Excerpt from Sesame’s debut novel, available this December:
The water rained down on me, and I stood there, head bowed, eyes closed, my hands on the wall. Typical shower pose for TV, when there’s no full frontal nudity. But it would do for my purposes - give me some escape from the case. My first real case. My first case that wasn’t exposing some cheating boyfriend, following some cheating wife and getting some snaps of her tonsil-fucking some dude in a doorway. My first job not sneaking around taking pictures of some guy making out with a girl that wasn’t his significant other in a bar or screwing in a car outside after closing time. I mean, hey you wanna pay me a couple hundred dollars to tell you that the tender lover you met on Tinder isn’t tenderizing somebody else on the side? I gotta pay the bills, too. But it was depressing, especially when your own did that, too. No, I needed to do something else.
The secret shopper bit was okay, but not challenging in any way. I could spend someone else’s money with the best of them, and even without any hints by clueless husbands, I could come up with something nice for an anniversary or birthday without my effort. And I was even good at taking their money and telling them to fuck off when they tried to hit on me the moment the case was over. But this one. This case…
It was everything I’d always wanted, what I thought detectiving was going to be like. Sorta? Maybe some more car chases, a murder, some kidnappings or art thieves. Maybe a loved one would be killed and I’d have to uncover the truth. Maybe someone was swindled, and I’d have to uncover the swindler. A lost child. A ghost in someone’s attic that maybe wasn’t a ghost but an elaborate ruse. I dunno. A girl could sit behind her cheap desk, feet up on the edge and drink and imagine a million things, like a boyfriend that doesn’t cheat. And yet, this case didn’t feel like any of those things. Not so far. It felt like failure already. Yeah, I’d gotten the job on Friday, and could I really be expected to have solved the case by whatever day it was now? But I just didn’t know. It didn’t feel like I was doing this right.
I pushed some shampoo through my hair, leaning in again to rinse, repeat, letting the hot water do its thing. The cucumber in the soap always smelled fresh and crisp, even if my movements weren’t. I even ignored the detachable shower head. I’d been so horny before, and now all I really needed was a bottle of wine and some nachos. Like a lot of nachos.
I spun around and let the water run over my face, then cut the water off just as music blasted from the other room. Volume set to “way too fucking loud; the neighbors will complain”. Caribbean jams on Pandora. Heavy base. Reggae accent. I recognized the first song and smiled as I climbed out of the shower, wrapping the first towel around my hair. Don’t Lie by Skip Marley rumbled through the open bathroom door, followed by Hurricane Beatrix. I grabbed the second towel and synched it around me just as Bea burst in and slapped the lights on.
“Lights on, chica! It’s Margarita Monday, and your favorite bitchacho has arrived!” She stood in the doorway, cut-off jean shorts and a tank top, barefoot as always, and beaming from ear to ear.
“Bitch, don’t you knock?” I couldn’t help but return her smile, and when she wrapped her arms around me, I leaned in and closed my eyes.
“Bitch, I got a key. I ain’t gotta knock. Machete don’t text. Bitchachos don’t knock.” She leaned back and stared at me. “You look like a girl needs some snacks.”
“Always, snacks, hermana. Always. Give me five?”
“No more than five,” she said, finally letting me go, and she turned and sashayed out the way she’d come in.
It took me less than five to get myself together, although to be honest most of that five was brushing out the rats nest on my head. I followed that up with royal blue running shorts, a tank and a light emerald green long-sleeve that had a deep swooping neck. When I padded back into the living room, my bare feet cool on the floor and the rest of me feeling a little more alive, I was met by a wave of sound. The music had shifted to an easy Bob Marley groove competing with the sound of the mixer. Bea stood in front of the most used electronic device in the place, tapping out a few more slurries of whatever the hell she’d filled it with. Once I had a few of those in me, there would be dancing, maybe some sad attempts at singing, more dancing, and a bunch of staring out over the balcony and trying not to drop a perfectly good glass five floors down.
The mixer whirled a few more times as I stood by the table, staring at my phone, waiting for her to be done. I needed to check messages now. Bea didn’t believe in fucking with your phone when friends were around. She wanted attention, focus, and most of all laughs. And even though I’d resisted at first, now when she was around, I knew she was right. The girl lit the world up around her, and it was always a win when you didn’t look away.