“How much?” he repeated, more warily.
She thought rapidly. Seventeen-year-old boys, she knew from past experience, had a habit of not lasting very long. She could probably go through all four of them in fifteen minutes, including time lost changing partners. If they didn’t have to drive very far to find a place where they could park in privacy, and if they didn’t waste too much getting down to business once they’d parked, she might even be able to get back in time for one more trick tonight. Thinking of this, and judging, as best she could, the amount of money the boy and his friends would be able and willing to spend, she came, almost without a pause in the conversation, to a number.
“Twenty-five dollars.”
She waited through the whispered consultation. Once they’d figured out that that was only six dollars and twenty-five cents apiece, the consultation was rapidly over. The door to the rear seat opened, a tall blond-haired boy stepped out, and the driver said, “Okay. Climb aboard.”
To her left was the blond boy. To her right was a short, black-haired, large-nosed boy, who looked terribly nervous. Up front, the boy beside the driver was black-haired and spectacled. She gave each of them a mental tag, to keep them straight. There was the Blond, the Driver, the Glasses, and the Nervous.
The car turned left at the next intersection and drove through dark and twisting streets. The Blond put his hand on her knee and squeezed experimentally. Remembering that she wanted them to be in condition to make short work of it, she smiled at him and squeezed back. He grinned and slid his hand up her leg, under the skirt, then murmured, “Why don’t you get the panties off right now? Save some time.”
“All right.”
It took a lot of squirming, in the crowded back seat, to get them off, and she made sure she did a lot of the squirming against Nervous, to her right. She wanted to get him in the mood, too, and she was afraid that would take some doing.
The squirming did the trick. When she was settled again, the Blond’s hand was once more up under her skirt, and the Nervous had a hand inside her blouse. He tugged at the bra and whispered, betraying the fact that he was still nervous, “Take that off, too.”
More squirming this time, complicated by the fact that the Blond’s hand was doing distracting things beneath the skirt, and finally her blouse was open and her bra off and lying on the ledge behind the seat. The Nervous bent forward and kissed her breast, and the Blond’s hand was still moving beneath her skirt. She closed her eyes and stopped thinking.
The car was on a main street for a while, and then off that, and there were occasional glimpses of the river off to the left. They passed warehouses and trucking concerns and bakeries, all closed and dark and silent now. They passed the spot where Richie Parsons had stopped living three hours before, but there was no longer any sign that there had been violence here tonight. This was also the spot where the cruising prowl car had so unexpectedly caught Joshua Crawford, open-faced and panting, the gun still in his hand, in the hard bright beams of its headlights, but the spot bore no witness of him, either. The car drove by, and farther on it turned left again, toward the river, and then right, and stopped.
Honour Mercy was ready. She wouldn’t have to fake her responses with these boys. But she still retained enough presence of mind to say, “Money in advance, boys. That’s standard.”
The four of them got out of the car, leaving Honour Mercy in the back seat, and consulted together outside. The Driver came back, finally, with the money. A five-dollar bill, a bunch of wrinkled singles, and two dollars in change. Honour Mercy stashed it all in her purse, stashed the purse on the window ledge with her bra, and smiled at the Driver. “Are you first?”
“You bet I am,” he said.
She’d given him the right nickname. He came at her fast and brutal, crushing her down in the cramped back seat, driving her down and back, half-smothering her. But his very force betrayed him. He was finished before he was barely started, leaving Honour Mercy moving alone. But he seemed satisfied as he crawled out of the car again, and walked over to the waiting group.
The Blond was second, and he had read books on the subject. He tried to come at her slow and gradually, full of technique. Under normal circumstances, she would have followed his lead, because she enjoyed the niceties of technique, no matter how academic. But there had been the hands and lips all over her on the ride, and the Driver had just finished with her, and she was in no mood to be gradual. She sunk her teeth into his shoulder and her nails into his buttocks and he forgot the textbooks.
They stopped together, rigid and straining and open-mouthed, and when he left, the inside of the car was beginning to be heavy with the acrid perfume of love.
Glasses came next, and he had a variety of ideas. There were other things he wanted done first, some of them very difficult in the back seat of a late-forties Ford, and she had a chance to cool down a bit and to begin to think again.
Glasses had her spend too much time with the preliminaries, and all at once the main event was canceled. But he smiled and shrugged and said, “That’s the way it goes.” And she knew that that was the way he had wanted it all along, and she wondered if he understood yet that he was homosexual.
Nervous came last, and Nervous wasn’t even ready. She realized, with a sinking feeling, that this was Nervous’s first time. The backseat was cramped, the air in the car was now too heavy for comfort, and she knew that she was a sweat-stained, disheveled and panting mess, stimulating to a man, perhaps, but not to a boy coming to sex for the first time.
She did what she could for him, smiling at him, talking gently with him, telling him that lots of men needed help in getting ready. She gave him the help he needed, half-afraid that it just wasn’t going to work out, and slowly she felt the interest growing within him. And when he was ready, she didn’t try to rush it, she tried to make it last, because she understood how important it was to him, this first time.
But nothing could have made him last. He was here and gone again in two shakes of his nervous tail, and then it was all over and she was alone in the back seat of the car and slipping back into her clothes.
They waited outside until she was ready. When she was dressed, she climbed out of the car, needing fresh air and a bit of walking to revive her completely.
The four of them were clustered around the front of the car, and she glanced at them, and all of a sudden she realized what was going to happen. She panicked, standing frozen beside the car, not knowing what to do.
The money, that was the important thing. The purse was still on the window ledge, and she tried to be casual in her movements as she opened the rear door again and got the purse.
But when she got back out of the car, they were bunched around her, and the Driver was standing directly in front of her, grinning bitterly and saying, “Where you going, Sweetheart?”
“Please,” she said. “I need the money. I need it.”
“Don’t we all,” he said.
Nervous, a step back of the rest, piped up, “Let her have the money, Danny. We can afford it.”
The Driver — Danny — whirled and snapped, “Shut up, you clown. Now she knows my name.”
“Let her keep the money,” Nervous insisted, but it was weak insistence, and Honour Mercy knew he was a poor, albeit willing, ally.
If she was going to get out of this, she’d have to get out by herself. While they were all distracted by Nervous, she might just be able to—
She got two steps, and the Driver had her by the arm and was spinning her around, shoving her back against the side of the car. “Where do you think you’re going, Sweetheart?” he asked again, and hit her solidly in the stomach.