“Lemme guess, hot stuff,” the chief said, “You saw Vicki Steele coming out of there, and now you’re pissed at me ’cos I didn’t tell you she was stripping up there.”
“Bingo,” Phil said.
Mullins spat again. “Well, I figure there’s things a man has to learn on his own, especially when it’s about a woman he’s still got the hots for.”
“I don’t have the hots for her. But I think it would’ve been pretty civil for you to warn me in advance. And you expect me to believe that Vicki Steele quit the department to do a strip show at Sallee’s?”
“No, I don’t expect you to believe that,” Mullins said very quickly. “So let’s make a little bit of an amendment to what I told you beforehand. Vicki Steele didn’t quit like North and Adams. I fired her.”
“For what?”
Mullins let out a stout chuckle. “Shit, Phil, you’re the one who dated her for five years. I gotta tell you?”
“You’re losing me, Chief. And you’re pissing me off more.”
“I fired her for dereliction of duty on the grounds of overt sexual misconduct.”
“Bullshit,” Phil said at once.
“Believe what ya want, son. But it’s true. You think I wanted to tell you about the shit she pulled?”
“Tell me,” Phil asked.
“She was fucking her boyfriends on duty, Phil. And since you asked for it, she had a lot of boyfriends. Or maybe I’m using the term ‘boyfriends’ out of respect—”
Phil glowered. “Be disrespectful, Chief.”
“She was fucking just about anything that moved,” Mullins pulled no punches. “Hey, you’re the one who asked. She was picking up guys at the Qwik-Stop and doing them right in the patrol car. She’d pull rednecks over at night for speeding, and she’d wind up fucking the guys. You want more?”
“Sure,” Phil said.
Mullins shrugged. “One night I came in and caught her blowing a prisoner in the lock-up. I got half a dozen complaints that she was rousting patrons at Sallee’s, pulling them over and threatening to DWI them, and then fucking the guys and letting them off. You want more, son?”
“Sure,” Phil said, a bit less enthusiastically this time.
“I have good reason—documented reason—to believe she was actually turning tricks while on duty. Threatening to write guys up for drinking behind the wheel, then fucking them for money in exchange for not writing them up. Christ, one night she even put the make on me, and I haven’t had a hard-on in about fifteen years.”
Phil sat back in his chair, reflecting. Vicki? A sex maniac? A…whore? Then he reflected further. She’d always been pretty feisty—and sometimes downright kinky—in bed. But that doesn’t mean she’s a nympho, he thought. Mullins seemed straight up about this—at least as straight up as he could be—but Phil had a hard time seeing Vicki Steele changing so drastically that she would actually blackmail traffic offenders into a scenario of prostitution.
“I just can’t believe it,” Phil said. “I just can’t see her doing things like that.”
Mullins’ brow raised as he took another spit. “Neither could I, until she told me the reason. And please don’t ask me to tell you what she said.”
“Tell me what she said,” Phil directed.
“You can’t handle it, Phil.”
“I can handle it. So quit fucking with me, will ya?”
Mullins set his jaw. He appeared genuinely distressed, which was something Phil had never recalled seeing. He cleared his throat, did a fidget in his seat, and said, “When I fired her, she said it was all because of you. You taking off without her. You dumping her.”
Phil stared. Could this really be? I cannot believe this, he told himself very slowly. Then his words grated, “I didn’t dump her.”
“Bullshit, Phil. When you leave a girl for a job, and she doesn’t want to move with you, that’s the same as dumping her. After you left she went nuts. She turned nympho. And when I shitcanned her, the very next week, she was stripping up at Sallee’s and turning tricks every night. Still don’t believe me?”
Phil’s voice turned black when he said, “No.”
Mullins, with a sour look, hoisted himself up, retrieved a folder from one of his file cabinets, and turned. “Buck North, Pete Adams, before they quit for the other departments, this PCP headache was just starting up. So I had them doing the same thing you did last night. Staking out Krazy Sallee’s, trying to get a read on what’s going on up there. Only these guys didn’t just take down tag numbers. They took pictures.”
Phil gulped as if a chunk of broken glass had stuck in his throat…
“Take a peek at your own risk,” Mullins warned. “But don’t get pissed at me for showin’ ya, ’cos you’re the one who asked.”
Then Mullins dropped the folder in Phil’s lap.
It was some presage, a hideous one: Phil refused to believe any implication, yet his hands hitched toward the folder like someone about to unveil an as-yet unidentified cadaver on a morgue slab. He opened the folder—
No, he thought very simply.
—and stared. His face felt as though it had fused into a mask of impassive stone. A small stack of 8x10 black and whites showed him first several nondescript women leaving Sallee’s hand in hand with various rubes. All tackily dressed in tight skirts, glittery blouses, high heels. Some were clearly less-defected Creekers, like the ones he’d seen last night. Next, a few grainy telephoto shots, obviously taken with fast film through a low-light lens. The discreet snapshots depicted the same women engaged in various sex acts with rough, jean-jacketed men. In pickup trucks and souped hot rods, behind the building.
One photo showed a Creeker woman—with one arm undeniably longer than the other—lying on her back on the garbage dumpster behind Sallee’s, her legs wrapped around some anonymous redneck’s back. Natter’s Imperial was seen in several of the shots, and so was Natter himself, tall, gaunt, and crevice-faced as he leaned to speak to several patrons in the entry.
And the last four photographs showed Vicki Steele performing the act of fellatio in the cabs of different pickup trucks. A final photograph showed her flashing a wicked smile as she stuffed paper cash into her bra. Something shiny splotched her blouse and hair, which could only be semen…
“Told ya so, didn’t I?” Mullins harped. He loaded a fresh pinch of snuff and immediately spat. “But you wouldn’t listen. That’s your problem, Phil. You never listen to anyone. You always gotta know more than the next guy about everything.”
Fuck you, Phil thought, but now, as he closed the folder, he knew the chief was right.
I asked for it, I got it, he thought. Happy now, you asshole?
“Now you know the score,” Mullins informed him. His desk chair creaked as he shifted his significant weight. “Sometimes the world really can be a piece of shit, huh?”
Phil didn’t say anything. He coldly placed the folder up on Mullins’ desk, his face still stiff as plaster.
“Go on home. Get some sleep.”
Phil rose as if climbing out of a tomb. The imagery swarmed behind his mind: Vicki’s head buried in some slob’s lap, semen shining like diamond-points in her hair, and like jeweled studs on her blouse.
A whore, Phil thought as he walked out of the station.
I dumped her, and she turned into a strip-joint whore…
— | — | —
Eight
It was a fascinating sound, a slick wet clicking, like duct tape being pulled off something tacky.
The world seemed to hum in his head: glories, wonders.
Mishmash words ricocheted in his brain. My poor brethren, he thought. I bless thee in thy error. I love thee…
Ah-no-prey-bee!
Skeet-inner!