Free Blank by Lippe Simone

his head and again got lost in the maze of hallways somewhere between the restaurant and the hotel foyer. When she finally found herself briefly alone she took the opportunity to hide behind one of the seemingly countless identical doors. She was trapped in the liquor closet.
     
    She heard the entire kitchen staff grunting and regrouping in the hall and was adjusting to the prospect of a long and well-stocked silence when she saw with a sort of resigned horror that she’d tracked clearly defined floury footsteps into the room. The door swung wildly open.
     
    The massive sous-chef seemed somewhat bigger now and infinitely less romantic, having lost any inclination of mating with Honor and wishing now only to reassert his authority. In a moment he was on her like an angry chef on a weedy maitre d’.
     
    The dead weight on her chest and the powerful hands around her neck competed in a lumbering marathon to compress the life out of Honor. This was just nature unfolding as it will, the strong dominating the weak, the large eating the small, the great and nicotine-stained crushing the life out of the civilized but slightly too adventurous. Honor mused again on this unwelcome concept of consequences and again found them not to her taste.
     
    This unexpected and, in Honor’s view, unwarranted demotion in the food chain grew more real and possible and lucid until it was the only thing in existence and she raised her arms above her head in surrender, stretching until the neck of a bottle nestled firmly in each hand. The smooth angles of Jack Daniels in the right, a classic baseball bat of Wild Turkey in the left. Honor brought them together on each of the chef’s temples with the precision and force of a clash cymbal player in his one solo moment of a Russian symphony with his judgmental mother in the audience.
     
    The Jack Daniels exploded in a cloud of glass and Tennessee cask-ripened sour-mash. The Wild Turkey held strong, still hoping to hit one out of the park. The chef was softened and bewildered and fell away to position himself helpfully on his knees with his head at roughly the level of a tee-ball. Honor couldn’t resist manifesting the metaphor and she treated herself to a brief wind-up before again testing the surprising strength of the bottle of Wild Turkey, which again held as the chef’s head bounced improbably off his shoulder and rebounded in a rubbery wobble like a porcelain bulldog rear dash ornament. The chef stared intently into the middle-field as though he saw there something that had scared him as a child. Then he fell the rest of the way to the floor in the way that only 225 lbs of lifeless meat can fall to a floor.
     
    Honor rewarded herself with a deep intake of air and turned to some crates of Mouton Cadet for richly needed support. She was enjoying the recovered liberty to breath and promising to never again take it for granted when the otherwise jolly tinkling sound of glass addressing glass drew her attention. The remaining kitchen workers were arming themselves with a bottle in each hand.
     

Honor chapter 4
    Facing the four leaderless kitchen staff and their eight bottles of vodka, whiskey and, in one case, Benedictine, Honor had one extraordinarily durable bottle of Wild Turkey. She was most decidedly outgunned and the kitchen staff now knew everything she could teach them about weaponizing liquor bottles. But she hadn’t yet taught them everything she knew about liquor bottles.
     
    With a touch of magician’s flare Honor presented her loyal Wild Turkey Kentucky Spirit on the tips of the fingers of her right hand and elaborately and carefully uncapped it with her left. Her audience looked on, duly curious but not yet sufficiently impressed to copy her. Bringing the bottle to her nose, she made a show of appreciating the noxious bouquet of a freshly opened bottle of 101 proof bourbon. She smiled broadly, licked her lips like a pantomime child-snatcher, and drank deeply.
     
    With a few