“You want me to go on the earie?” his brother asked.
“What?” Larkin said.
“You want me to listen around, see I can get a line on her? Bust her fuckin’ head and get the watch back for you?”
“You’ve got other things to do,” Larkin said.
“No, I ain’t too busy just now,” Jimmy said. “You want me to, or not?”
“Well, I’d like to find her,” Larkin said.
“Then consider it done,” Jimmy said. “What’s her name?”
“Angela West. That’s the name she gave me. But I don’t think that’s her real name.”
“You got a picture of her?”
“I gave it to Samalson.”
“Then tell me what she looks like.”
“Blonde hair, blue eyes, about five feet nine inches tall...”
“How old?”
“Twenty-two, twenty-three. Tits out to here, legs that won’t quit...”
“They’ll quit when I find her,” Jimmy said.
What he told her, he said there was dope in the house there.
Coke in the house, he said it had to be worth on the street something like seven hundred and fifty K. Six kilos of pure, something like that. This customer of his had seen them — half a dozen of those white plastic bags — when he opened the safe. Well, seven including the one that was already open and on the dresser. Figure he’d already used a few bags, or sold them off, whatever, so say there were still four in the house, maybe three, shit, even two would make it worthwhile.
You came away with two kilos of pure, that was a bit more than seventy ounces, you stepped on it till you got it to street strength, you could ask a hundred and a quarter a gram. Something like twenty-eight grams to the ounce, you multiplied that by your seventy ounces, you got nineteen hundred and sixty grams times a hundred and twenty-five bucks, you came away with two hundred and forty-five thousand bucks, almost a quarter of a million, that’s if there was only two kilos in the house.
You could add, say, another hundred and a quarter, give or take, for every kilo you came away with. Come out of there with four kilos, for example, you had half a million bucks right there in your hand. You were talking two point two pounds per kilo. You were talking carrying eight, ten pounds the most in your tote bag when you left the house. Walk away with it, disappear in the night.
She told him it sounded dangerous.
Also, how did he know this customer of his wasn’t full of shit?
He said For Christ’s sake, I’ve known her for ages, she’s a hooker same as you, she had no reason to lie to me, she was just telling me an interesting story.
Listening to him tell her all this, she was thinking amateurs shouldn’t fuck around with dope deals.
She told him she knew a hooker in LA, a working girl like herself, who got involved bringing dope in on an airplane. They were paying her fifty thousand bucks to bring the dope in from Antigua where it had come from London by way of Marseilles. All she had to do was carry in this false bottom bag with the dope in it. So they brought out the police dogs that day, and she was now doing twenty in San Quentin, and the guys who hired her were still having a nice time on their yacht on the French Riviera. Amateurs shouldn’t fuck around with dope deals, she told him.
Also, you shouldn’t try to cross guys dealing dope.
That’s how amateurs got their brains blown out. Crossing guys who were dealing dope for a living. Nobody likes his rice bowl broken, she told him. You mess with a guy’s rice bowl, he’s gonna come break your head.
So I don’t think I want to do it, she said.
But at the same time she was thinking Oh God, this could be my way out.
This was back in March.
They were at this house he was renting in Hallandale. They were sitting by his swimming pool. This was the beginning of March, it was still too cold to swim here no matter what anybody said. She’d flown to Miami from LA, got there on the twentieth of January. A girlfriend on the Coast told her she heard they were paying two, two-fifty for an hour’s work in Miami, she ought to go down there, check it out. Any given city, you wanted to know what call girls were getting you looked in the Yellow Pages under “Massage” or “Escort.” In LA, Jenny was registered with an outcall massage service that advertised in the Yellow Pages and accepted credit cards. You dialed the number, you got somebody who told you what the agency fee was and asked if you wanted a girl to call you. What Jenny did when she called, she reminded you that the agency fee was fifty bucks, and then she mentioned that she usually got a hundred an hour. So what it was, it was a hundred and fifty bucks an hour, did you want some company or not? Some nights, she turned seven, eight tricks and went home with a thousand bucks when you figured the guys who tipped extra for an, ahem, exceptional blow job. Some nights she watched Johnny Carson. Miami was supposed to be two hundred, two-fifty an hour, which was a lot of bullshit as it turned out. She figured she’d get a few days’ sun — actually it was also rainy and cold — and then head back to the Coast.
The day before she was supposed to leave, she met a girl on the beach, told the girl she was an insurance investigator working for a company in LA, here settling a big claim, be leaving tomorrow. She always made up stories about what she did for a living. A lot of her friends were straight, and you couldn’t just say Hey, guess what, I’m a hooker. So she either worked for a bank, or an insurance company, or she did research for a computer company, or she was office manager for a textile firm, all bland jobs nobody would ask her much more about. She liked playing different roles. Well, that was why she’d gone out to LA in the first place, to become a big movie star, sure, some star. A hooker was what she was, plain and simple. But even so, she thought of hooking as playing different roles, sort of.
Anyway, she’d hit it off right away with the girl on the beach — Molly Ryder was her name — and Molly was saying like Gee, what a shame it is you’re leaving so soon, just when we’re getting to know each other, it’s a shame you can’t stay a little longer, get the feel of the place, ’cause it’s real nice here, it really is. And then she told Jenny that there was gonna be a party tonight at this guy’s house in Hallandale that had a swimming pool and everything, and there’d be some interesting quite far-out people there, if Jenny would like to come along.
So Jenny went to the party and met a lot of interesting quite far-out people who were doing coke and stuff and decided to hang around Miami a while, see if she couldn’t drum up a little trade at the fancier hotels on the beach, maybe even find some old geezer she could play house with, because Miami seemed to have less phonies here than there were in LA where they came a thousand to the square inch. What came a thousand to the square inch down here were the cockroaches. She remembered them from when she used to be a kid living down here. They called them palmetto bugs down here. They were as big as your forefinger, some of them. You stepped on them, you jumped up and down on them, they crawled away all crippled and broken but they wouldn’t die unless you hit them with a sledgehammer. Also, they knew how to fly. Staying with Molly the first few weeks she was in Miami, she almost wet her pants when one of them flew right up into her face.