Free The Parallel Apartments by Bill Cotter

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    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  are considered especially heinous. In New York City
    She turned up the sound, chose the iciest Dr Pepper, and eased back into bed, trembling with sudden excitement and optimism. Ah, there, on TV, a tiny foot poking out of a trash bag. At the commercial break she tapped out a particolored sparkler of an orgasm, the last shivers of which dissipated justas SVU returned to find Olivia Benson in morbid trialogue with Stabler and Dr. Melinda Warner, the show’s brilliant medical examiner.
    â€œI can start again,” Justine told Olivia.
    Right after you settle all of your family accounts, Olivia seemed to scold. Including your own little inner family.
    â€œI will.”
    You’re going to keep her, right? Start your new life as two?
    â€œI don’t know.”
    Those pills could kill you both, the brilliant Dr. Warner seemed to say.
    â€œYeah, I know.”
    And you’re no good to us dead, said Stabler.
    â€œHuh?”
    We need you here at the precinct, said all three at once.
    â€œMe? Why?”
    Just come with us.
    The elite SVU force all call her Justine except for the Captain, who calls her Just, and Fin, who calls her Baby, and Justine wears tight dresses and fuzzy tops and vintage Tiffany earrings with little golden clapperless bells, and she mans a big desk, sips tarry black precinct coffee from an ILOVEAUSTEX coffee mug, and reads stacks of New York Posts, Austin American-Statesmans, Der Spiegels, Le Mondes, Village Voices , etc., because her job is to hunt for signs of child abuse and sexual crime in the funnies. She is good at her job. She saves lives every day. She’s saved at least a dozen in the past week. In the last panel of Monday’s Curtis, little brother Barry gets chased into a garage by a stereo salesman bent on abduction and ritual trepanning but Justine is able to get a SWAT team to the garage before Tuesday’s installment; Larry Lockhorn, disguised as a perverted Santa, turns up in For Better or For Worse with unspeakable conduct on his mind, but Justine clips him out and pastes him into Mark Trail, where he drowns in a trout stream; Cathy appears manacled upside down to a stone wall in a secret dungeon in the Wizard of Id, but is freed when Dr. Huang awakens the king’s buried abuse; a new child, Kevin, turns up in Family Circus without explanation, and Justine, on a hunch, sends Munch to Bil Keane’s house, where he finds all the Peanuts on choke chains in little basement corrals, living on doodlebugs and belt leather. Schroeder is found dead; Justine and the rest of the SVU crew must submit to Huang for grief counseling. Huang makes a suddenpass at Justine; she submits. But before he can lift her elite SVU skirt and take her, Justine wakes up in a sweat, humping the Frito bedspread, which indeed appears Huang-shaped in the blue glow of the TV.
    Justine fetched a Dr Pepper floating in the tepid sink-water. She pulled up her nightgown and used the hem to swab her forehead and underarms. She examined herself in the mirror. Her belly did not appear to have swelled. It was only forty-three days, after all. She shouldn’t be showing yet… should she? Justine couldn’t remember. After Valeria’s death, her mind had shed every baby-book fact there was to know.
    She leaned as far over as possible to sniff at her nethers. Not unlike mutton bouillon, the aroma. She hadn’t stopped to bathe on her whole trip (except once, arguably, when she stopped at a Chevron someplace in Virginia to rasp Doritos residue off her hands with dry paper towels), so Justine took a long soak, eroding to slivers two credit-card-sized bars of Frito Motel deluxe marionberry-verbena soap.
    She got out, refilled the tub, this time with scalding water, squeezed a one-ounce bottle of Frito Motel deluxe shampoo into it, then submerged her clothes, including her faded and flaking Frank Frazetta warrior T-shirt. She stirred and agitated