Pam's eyes jerked open and she smiled half-guiltily, and half-satisfied that she'd just given Eddie quite a lusty little sex show."Aren't you glad, to..., Eddie?" Pamasked as she sat up, opening her arms to welcome him to come over and join her."I sure am glad, Pam. I knew the day you and Brian moved in, that the future was looking good for me." Don't you know better than to sneak up on a lady half-naked in her own backyard, Eddie?" Lady, Pam?" Eddie asked. "Are you serious? Lady?" Yes, Eddie,. I followed John around the yard like a lost puppy. I replaced my absent mother and drunken father with John. We would sit in his small two room cabin talking while we sat around the pot belly stove that served him as both furnace and stove. From John I learned about all the fantastic places he had been. How he traveled first around the country and then the world. I hung on his every word and pictured his descriptions. I believed every word he told me. I even retold his stories to my teachers. ’ ‘But if you know, why don’t you…I don’t know, go to the cops?’ The tone of impatient condescension was back, like it had never left. ‘I thought you read all the stories, girl,’ he snapped. ‘They’re untouchable. Any cop who goes to investigate comes back saying that the claims are totally groundless–and if they’re young and pretty, then they quit the force a week later and start working as a porn star for some producer who knows the right people. You can’t fight them…if you try, they’ll just. There had been no problems getting to Kobekistan, and the flight from Abu Dhabi on the local airline had been better than he expected. This was going to be a push-over. There was no sign as he was driven into the city from the airport of a single rival restaurant, even though he saw some of the better-known chain stores already had outlets here.As far as he knew, all that meant was nobody had considered that this little country, about the size of one of the smaller U.S. states, was worth.