"Let's get the business out of the way, honey. Then we can be friends. Now," she went on, after Brennan had nodded, "it's gonna cost a hundred. But for only a hundred and fifty I can give you something really special. Something really different."
"What's that?" Brennan asked.
She was already pulling open the drawer of her cluttered, rickety vanity. "It's called rapture, honey, and it's sheer heaven."
She held up a small vial of blue powder, much like the one Brennan had seen the night of the party. But as soon as she drew it out, she became fixated on it. She stared at it with a growing blankness and her hands began to shake a little. She unstoppered it and stared at it like it held the keys to the kingdom.,
"What's it do?" Brennan asked, watching her closely. "Do?" As if unable to resist any longer, she dipped her forefinger into the vial and then put it in her mouth, rubbing it swiftly across her already stained gums. She smiled, and sucked her now-blue fingertip daintily, as if it'd been dipped in some sort of delicious sauce. "It makes everything so fresh and tasty and good feeling. Let me rub a little on your cock, honey, and it will be out of this world."
"Is it dangerous?"
Lori laughed and shook her head. "No way. I've been taking it for weeks now" She leaned closer and smiled confidentially. "Me and the guy who made it are like this," she said, entwining two fingers.
"I'll bet." Brennan moved closer and she smiled in unfocused ecstasy, her hand dropping to the crotch of his jeans and fumbling there. He smiled at her. "No thanks," he said, and smoothly took the vial of rapture away from her. "Hey!"
"Why can't we do it without the rapture?" he asked. "Because it's so good with it."
"I like it plain."
"But it's better, it really is," she said with increasing frenzy.
He remembered what Quincey had said about it a couple of days before, a drug that was so good that it makes a whore like sex.
"What's it like without the rapture?" he asked, holding the vial away as she snatched for it.
"Like always," she spat. "Boring. Dead. Unfeeling."
"How about food? What's that like without a dose?" She made a face. "Cardboard and paste. Rotting compost."
"Wine? Champagne?"
"Tepid water with shit floating in it. Give me that!" Brennan held it up and away from her, shaking his head. "I need it. I have a friend who might want to have a look at this."
"I'll scream," she said.
Brennan shook his head. "No, you won't. I'm going to give you a dose, then I'm going to tie you up and you can tell everyone that I robbed you."
"Give, me two doses. One for later," she panted. "Sure."
Lori nodded frantically and turned back to her vanity. She gave Brennan a small tin box into which he tipped a shot of the powder. Then she handed him a small mirror. He laid out a line and she found a straw somewhere and took it all in through her nose with a long snort. She leaned back and smiled.
"What's it like when you do it that way?" he asked curiously.
"Good thoughts," Lori said dreamily. "Only good thoughts." He nodded and led her to the bed. She sat down obediently as he tore the sheet into strips, bound and gagged her. He left her room wondering what kind of thoughts she'd have after the rapture wore off.
10:00 P.M.
Digger Downs had been right about one thing: the hotel where Kahina had spent her final weeks was a real pit.
A half-dozen elderly jokers sat in the lobby, watching an ancient black-and-white Philco while they waited to die. When Jay entered, they all looked at him with dim incurious eyes. No one spoke. The jokers, like the lobby, smelled of decay.
The night clerk was a stout woman in her sixties with her hair worn in a bun. Her breath smelled of gin and she didn't know nothing about no Ay-rab girl, but she was perfectly willing to let Jay have a look at the files, once he'd slipped her a ten.
The records were in just as shitty a shape as the rest of the building, but after thirty minutes with the registration cards and receipt books from May and June of 1987, Jay found what he was looking for. She'd paid two months in advance, in cash, for a room on the third floor. Less than three weeks later, the same room had been rerented, to someone listed only as Stig.
Jay showed the cards and the receipt book to the night clerk. "Her," he said, pointing out the name.
The corner of a ten-dollar bill was just visible under. the registration card; it did wonders for the old woman's memory. "Oh, yeah, she was the pretty one. I only saw her once or twice, thought she looked kind of Jewish. You mean she was an Ay-rab?"
"A Syrian," Jay said. "What happened to her?" The woman shrugged. "They come, they go."
"Who's this Stig?" Jay asked.
"Stigmata," the old woman said. She made a face. "Disgusting. Makes me sick just to look at him, but Joe, he says even jokers need a place to stay. If it was up to me… honestly, these people are like animals. Anyway, Stig didn't pay his rent and Joe evicted him, good riddance to bad rubbish, and we rented his room to the Ay-rab girl. But then a few weeks later Stig had the money he owed us and he says he wants his room back. We hadn't seen that girl for a week or so, so we let him back in."
"Did the woman leave any personal effects?"
"Personal what?"
"Any stuff," Jay said impatiently. "Letters, papers, a passport. Luggage. Clothing. She just up and vanished one day, right? What did you find when you cleared out her room?"
The night clerk licked her lower lip. "Yeah, now that I think about it, she had some stuff." She studied him greedily. "You family? I don't think I can give you her stuff unless you're family. Wouldn't be right."
"Of course not," Jay said. "But it so happens that Mr. Jackson is a very close relative of hers."
"Huh?" she said, eyes blank with confusion.
Jay sighed a deep, put-upon sigh. "How about I give you twenty bucks for her stuff?" he said wearily.
That she understood at once. She took a key off the pegboard behind her and led Jay down to a damp, chilly basement. A dozen cardboard boxes were stacked unevenly behind the water heater, each marked with a room number. The boxes on the bottom were green with fungus and halfcollapsed, their numbers all but illegible, but Kahina's legacy was on top.
He went through the carton in a deserted corner of the lobby. There wasn't much: an English-language edition of the Koran, a street map of Manhattan, a paperback copy of The Making of the President 1976 with the chapters on Gregg Hartmann dog-eared and underlined, some odd bits of clothing, a box of Tampax. Jay sorted through it twice, then carried the carton back to the desk. "Where's the rest of it?"
"That's it. Ain't no more."
Jay slammed the carton down on the desk, hard. The woman jumped and Jay winced as his broken rib made him pay the price for the gesture. "You've got forty bucks of my money and all I've got is a box of trash. You telling me this woman flew in from Syria with nothing but a few tampons in a U-Haul box? Gimme a fucking break! Where's her luggage? Where's her clothing? Did she have any cash, any jewelry, a wallet, a passport… anything?"
"Nothing," the old woman said. "Just what's in the box, that's all we found. These jokers, they don't take care of their things like you and me. The way they live, it's disgusting."
"Show me her room."
Her eyes narrowed. "What's in it for me?"
That did it. Jay shaped his fingers into a gun and pointed. "Ta-ta," he said, popping her away to the runway at Freakers. Thursday night was all-nude female joker mud wrestling. He hoped she was in better shape than she looked.
The soft pop of her disappearance made a few of the jokers across the lobby look up. If they wondered what Jay was doing behind the desk, rummaging among the keys, they didn't wonder enough to do anything about it.
Of course, there was no elevator in the building. Jay trudged up three flights of stairs, grateful that it wasn't five, and then up and down the poorly lit hallway until he found the right door. His head was pounding and his side hurt like a sonofabitch. There was light flooding through the transom, he saw, and the noise of a television from within. Jay was in a rotten mood by then. He didn't bother knocking.