PATRICK, a few nights later at the motel

For six months, I've been circling the drain. I'm a conman, a thief, an addict, a drunk. And now, I've spent the night in a seedy motel in the arms of a total stranger. I've lost myself. Or perhaps, this is what I really am, and I've found myself. The one thing I know is, when I fall, I do it fast and with enthusiasm.

I'm not unfamiliar with the experience of women coming on to me. I've escorted several naked ones from my sofa at the CBI. Lorelei is not even the first woman in Las Vegas to show up at my motel room. Not the first to arrive bearing serious gifts like chicken soup and bail. Just the first in ten years to get through to me.

Her eyes told me someone she loved had been violently ripped away from her. That she lived with fear and hopelessness and death. We had a lot in common. And her damage spoke to mine.

I think of Lisbon and how this first woman should be her. But Lisbon still hopes to find happiness. And I have none to give her. So I let Lorelei into my room.

We watched a TV show about jungle creatures doing jungle things to each other and it provided a nice segue to our first kiss. She wriggled out of her clothes like a happy puppy. She is lush and full-breasted and at the juncture of her thighs, sports a landscaped heart of curly dark hair. Which pretty much sealed the deal for me.

It had been a long time and I didn't trust my body to do what it needed to do. And I didn't want the whole thing over with too soon. My male pride would be mortally wounded. So my strategy going in was to lead with some feats of hand-mouth coordination that, years ago, made The Boy Wonder popular with the local girls on the carney circuit. This had her screaming her head off for the first half hour or so. My thinking here was to insure that no matter how speedy part two might turn out to be, she would walk away feeling it was worth the wax job. It was obvious from the way she responded when I lavished so much time on her, that she wasn't used to that kind of attention.

Then she wanted me inside her and once that was accomplished, it became clear to both of us that all the equipment worked the way it should and, over the course of the evening, we worked our way from the bed to the shower and back to the bed again.

And that is where I find myself. I pull the covers over both of us. She turns over in her sleep with her glossy hair spread over the pillow and her false eyelashes miraculously in place.

Now that I have the lust out of my system, there's something in the back of my mind that's bothering me about tonight. Something I'm missing. Something I'm just too tired to bring to the front. But I'm not going to think about that right now. Right now, I'm going to do something else I haven't done in a long time. Sleep.