“I guess that makes sense,” she said, nodding a little.
“And do you know who else likes to munch muff in that band?” he asked her, getting into the pleasure of spreading gossip. He knew he was not supposed to be talking about his high-revenue passengers like this, but he couldn’t stand any of them except for Coop and it was pleasurable to spread their dirty laundry about. Besides, this traveling slut he had just boned (she had told him she worked for an insurance company in Hartford and often came to Boston on business) would not be able to spread his tales very far. His gossip was unverifiable, and it was very unlikely that anyone she told would even believe her.
“Who?” Jessica asked.
“Jake Kingsley’s wife,” he said slyly.
“Laura Kingsley?” she said, very surprised.
“That’s right,” Njord said. “She’s the sax player. It seems as if she likes to munch clam better than she likes blowing the horn though.”
“How do you know this?” she asked.
“The same way I know about Celia,” he said. “It’s a small group and everyone knows everyone else’s business. Laura—they call her Teach for some reason—brings female groupies back to the hotel with her on a regular basis. They stay for a few hours and then the limo takes them back to the arena with the other groupies that Coop and Charlie always have.”
“Female groupies, huh?” she said, quite intrigued by this piece of gossip. “And she does this openly? Right in front of the other band members?”
“Yep,” Njord confirmed. “I’ve actually seen her with a few of them myself—not in the bedroom, mind you, but in the hotel, heading up to her room. She likes the younger chicks, in their twenties, the sluttier the better.”
“Wow,” she whispered. “Does Jake Kingsley know about this?”
Njord shrugged. “I don’t know for sure,” he said, “but I think there’s a good chance he does. Coop told me that Kingsley and Valdez are pretty tight with each other; and that Laura and Celia are pretty close too. They have a saying that what happens on the road stays on the road, but that doesn’t generally apply to people who hang out together and do business together. I wouldn’t think, anyway.”
“What about Laura Kingsley and Celia?” she asked. “Or Laura and Suzie? Are they getting it on?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” Njord said. “Laura and Suzie do have this flirtatious relationship with each other, but it doesn’t seem ... you know ... real. She used to join Valdez and Suzie up in their room when they were smoking cigars up there—on the nights she didn’t have a lesbian groupie eating her out anyway—but I don’t think she’s been up there even once since the two of them started sleeping together every night.”
“Is she feeling a little left out, I wonder?”
Another shrug. “Maybe. The frequency of her bringing lesbo groupies back to the hotel with her has certainly increased since Valdez and Suzie started getting it on.”
They talked a little bit more, shifting away from tour gossip and back onto Njord’s favorite subject: his tales of being a daring, adventurous bush pilot in Alaska (even though he had never actually soloed there, had less than twenty flight hours logged in the Cessna Caravan, and all of the tales were either stories told to him by others or things he had simply made up). Jessica listened attentively, with seeming fascination and awe.
Finally, however, she declared that she really needed to get back to her hotel room and finish up her notes on the presentation she was going to be giving tomorrow. She got up and put her clothes back on while he continued to lay naked on the bed, watching her.
“Look me up the next time you’re in Boston,” she told him. “I’m in the book.”
“I’ll do that,” he said, and he was even semi-sincere about the promise. She had been pretty good in the old sack and she was enjoyable to talk to.
She picked up her purse from the nightstand next to the bed and, after one last smile, one last farewell, stepped out the hotel room door.
As soon as she was gone, Njord pulled the covers over himself and turned out the lights. He would take a little nap and then get up and have dinner. Later tonight, he would head down to the bar to check out the night action. If he were lucky, he might just score himself another piece to tear off.
Jessica Barstow did not go back to her hotel room to work on her presentation. She did not have a room in the hotel and she had no presentation to work on—at least not a presentation that had anything to do with insurance sales. Instead, she left the building and walked out to the parking lot where her 1994 Toyota Camry was parked.
She got inside and fired up the little engine to get the heat going as it was a bit of a chilly night. She then opened her purse and pulled out the battery powered cassette recorder that was inside. The tape was now rewound since she had pushed the button that did this shortly after stepping out of the pilot’s hotel room. She ejected it from the machine and put it into the Camry’s cassette player. It began to play. She fast forwarded it in spurts, skipping over all the parts where she had ridden upstairs in the elevator with Njord, where they had had a few minutes of risqué conversation after entering the room, and the five minutes or so of them having sex (what a crappy fucking lay that was, she thought sourly). Obviously, she would skip past that part entirely when she duplicated the tape later tonight.
As she drove to her modest home in Lowell, just northwest of the city, she listened to the conversation she and Njord had just had. She was still astounded by the allegations Njord had thrown out about Celia Valdez and Laura Kingsley.
Gold! she thought happily as she confirmed that the machine had captured the discussion in its entirety and with a decent amount of audio clarity. Absolute fucking gold!
She had time to listen to the tape twice on the drive. Once she got home to her three-bedroom cottage within walking distance of the Merrimack River, she put the original tape into her stereo system and ran it past the sex scene (it had really been fucking boring anyway). She placed a blank cassette in the second cassette slot, pushed play on the first one and then record on the second one. She then kicked her two cats off the couch so she could sit down, opened up a notebook, and listened to the conversation a third time, this time jotting down notes.
Once the recording was complete, she ejected the original and carried it over to her safe. She labeled it and placed in inside. She then took the second tape out of the machine, placed it into its case, and labeled that as well. Only then did she sit back down and pick up the phone. She dialed the number for the editor-in-chief of the regional weekly gossip magazine known as New England Reports. This was a publication that primarily concerned itself with the sex lives and financial malfeasance of political and business figures throughout the Boston metropolitan statistical region. However, they were certainly not above reporting on celebrities that came into their radar range.
Jessica Barstow was a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she had majored in Journalism. She was also a borderline sex addict, an affliction stemming from being molested on a semi-regular basis by her uncle from the ages of twelve to sixteen; incidents that, to this day, she had never spoken of with anyone. Unable to get a job as a journalist at any of the respectable publications in the region due to her young age (she was only twenty-six currently) and lack of experience, she had accepted the position at NER a year after her graduation and had been there ever since. It was not the most glamorous job she had hoped to get, but it did allow her to use her propensity for seducing men (and the occasional woman) professionally.
Her official title was “Investigative Reporter”. But to the targets she slept with for the purpose of opening their mouths and spilling information, she was known by a different title: Troll.