Suddenly I felt very good.
Suddenly I also felt pretty ridiculous sitting there on the pot. I got up, having an insane wish to do something with the counterfeit other than what its manufacturer had intended, restrained myself mightily, and sauntered out of the men’s room. There was still time for a drink and I had one at my table.
“Why don’t you buy one for me?”
She was blonde and busty and an argument against celibacy. She had a strong face with high cheekbones and large blue eyes and a red mouth that was a positive sex symbol. Her lips were parted slightly and sex spilled out between them. Come to think of it, why didn’t I buy her a drink?
So I did. She ordered a daiquiri and put it away in record time. She told me her name was Rhonda King, which I doubted, and I told her my name was Nat Crowley, which was also pretty doubtful, all in all. Her feet played games with my feet and her eyes turned into little blue lodestones, drawing me into them. She was quite an experience, let me tell you.
“This bar is noisy, Nat. Couldn’t we go somewhere else? Someplace quiet?”
I felt obscure tugs of loyalty to Sensuous Cindy, then gave them up. What the hell, I was leaving Cindy, wasn’t I? Besides, she was the little bitch who was dragging me down Nightmare Alley without telling me what the nightmare was all about. I didn’t owe Cindy anything. And, since I was running out on her, I wasn’t going to have much chance to pay her off anyway.
And here I was.
And there was Rhonda.
“Where could we go?”
“I have a place.”
“Well... fine. I mean—”
“One thing, Nat. Maybe you’ll object, but it is going to cost you. I’m good and I’m selective and I’m worth the money, but it’s strictly pay-for-play with me.”
It was a surprise but I guess it shouldn’t have been. When a girl comes on like that out of the blue she has to be a whore. Not in the books I read, of course, but in life. This is a good world and all, but it’s not that good.
“How much?”
“Twenty dollars.”
It took all of three seconds for the beauty of that to hit me. I suddenly knew what I was going to do with one of the fake twenties I was carrying around. I was going to roll around in the sack with Rhonda King. The notion pleased me immensely.
There is a great deal to be said for paying a whore in counterfeit money. Poetry, kind of. Poetry and rhythm and melody. I was very pleased with myself. “Twenty,” I said, “is fine.”
A sucker play? I didn’t know. She could take my twenty ahead of time and ditch me. It was a line I would never have fallen for if the twenty involved was real. Since it wasn’t, and since I was just going to throw it the hell away anyhow, I didn’t much care if I was the mark in a one-woman con game. I’d go along for the ride. I would win even if I lost.
So what the hell.
I found my wallet, slipped out a twenty, folded it and passed it to her under the table. She opened it, looked down at it, and smiled. She was a happy girl. I wasn’t going to take the fun out of it for her.
“Let’s go, Nat.”
“I don’t have a car.”
“I do. Come on.”
I came on, out of the bar to the street, down the street to her car. It was a pretty fancy car for a whore but then she was a pretty fancy whore. The car was a big black Mercury. She drove and I sat next to her.
I kept my hands busy. She either liked it or put up a good act, and I decided that I was getting my money’s worth even if we didn’t wind up in bed. I slipped one arm around her and filled up one hand with breast — firm solid flesh, fine flesh. She must have been a prewar model, I remember thinking, because they didn’t try to save material when they put her together.
I put the other hand up her skirt and found out that she didn’t believe in underwear. It was a happy discovery. Happy for both of us, I suppose, because she was having a little trouble with the car. She kept squirming in her seat and tightening her thighs around my hand and a couple of times she damn near lost control of the car.
“Nat,” she breathed. “Oh, we are going to have fun. We are going to have lots of fun.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
At a streetlight she turned and came into my arms for a long kiss. It was a jolly one, believe me. The Phoenix citizenry must have had fun watching us ignore the fact that it was broad daylight out. And we ignored the bejesus out of it.
I did something with one of my hot hands and she let out a little moan. It sounded nice and I did it again and she moaned again.
“You better hurry,” I managed to say. “Or we won’t get to your place. We’ll have our jollies here.”
“Here?”
“In the car,” I said. “In the middle of the street.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“Probably illegal, though.”
“But lots of fun—”
I made myself let go of her and told her to drive. She drove, then parked, then got out of the car and told me to come with her. I didn’t need a second invitation.
On the way up the stairs I thought that I shouldn’t be that excited. Hell, she was only a whore. And whores just aren’t all that exciting. Cash on the line is no basis for love.
The hell of it was this — it didn’t seem like a cash deal. It took me half the walk upstairs to figure out why. The reason was simple — this wasn’t a cash thing, it was seduction. One of those seductions where the victim is getting faked out. And Rhonda, or whatever in hell her name might have been, was definitely getting faked out.
We reached the top of the staircase and I reached for her. She turned to me and all of her was next to all of me. My chest was very warm where her breasts were pressed tight against me. My hands were also warm — they cupped her buttocks and held her close. And my mouth was on fire — her tongue was in it and her tongue knew ingenious tricks.
“This it?”
I pointed at a door. She nodded. This, it seemed, was indeed it. And it was a damn good thing. I could not have climbed another flight of stairs. But I wondered why she was just sort of standing there, not getting ready to open the door. Hell, I wanted to get the show on the road. “Nat—”
“C’mon,” I said, running my hands over her body. I touched interesting parts of her and grinned ghoulishly. “C’mon, dammit. I can’t wait much longer.”
“Okay,” she said. “You first.”
And she pointed at the door. I walked to it, wrapped my hand around the door’s knob, which couldn’t compare with hers, and thought about opening the door. Strange that it wasn’t locked. But then a whore wouldn’t keep her door locked. Not unless she was afraid of somebody stealing her basin. Of course, there was always the chance that I would step inside and get hit on the head. But I was willing to take the chance. I opened the door and stepped inside.
I didn’t get hit on the head.
That would have been too easy.
Instead I stared at three men and two guns. I didn’t recognize one man or either gun, but the other two men were fellows I had seen before.
Reed.
And Baron.
“Inside,” Reed was saying. “And shut the door, Lindsay. We don’t want to be disturbed.”
8
“Good going, Lori. You, Lindsay — don’t move. Just stand there. And start talking.”
A bell rang somewhere in the back of my head. Lori? The bell murmured something about a girl named Lori Leigh. Cindy had described her as blonde and busty, which was certainly a pretty accurate description of my girl Rhonda. I’d given up Lori Leigh as a bad dream about the time when Cindy’s story started coming up roses. I had made a mistake.