“So what can I do you for, handsome?”
“The works,” I said, fishing out the wad of fives and tens I’d scored over the course of the day. What can I say? Sex is just one of those horses I ride backward. “That… and… some questions.”
She did her best not to roll her eyes. Hookers generally don’t like guys-guilt-ridden nerds, mostly-who ask a lot of questions. All the questioners want is to get fucked, and yet they go through all the motions of “empathizing with the plight” of the women they’re fucking as a way of servicing their moral debt. I actually knew this one hooker who had CASH ONLY tattooed above her shaved pussy. “Read the sign,” was the only answer she would give to questions. “Money ain’t the only thing that talks,” she told me once, “un-fucking-fortunately.”
“Well, really, I only have one question.”
Jenny had already grabbed my hand and pulled me into the living room gloom. “Shoot.”
“You know that guy who was just here?”
“Yeah, sure,” she said, undoing my belt and tearing open my button fly. “Brad.”
I smiled. “Brad. Exactly.”
“What about him?” She said this while palming the crotch of my boxers. The auto-tease. Most hookers are as mechanical as a car wash.
“Did he swing by here last Saturday night, say around midnight?”
She stopped, took a confused step back, which was kind ofembarrassing because she had peeled my jeans down to my knees. “You mean when that girl went missing…” she said. “The other Jennifer.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you a cop or something?”
“Hell no. Just a private dick. Her parents hired me to assist the police.”
I could tell she had already guessed as much. It was pretty obvious that the two of us had come from the same side of the tracks, even though I was urban and she was country. The side that called cops “pigs.”
“Do you think they’ll find her?” she asked.
The way she said this told me she had been following the story closely. I supposed it was unnerving having someone with your name vanish in a town this small-especially doing what Jenny did for a living.
“No,” I said with a what-can-you-do shrug. “Not in one piece, anyway.”
“I think so too,” she said, her look wandering from sharp to vague to sharp again. “I just have this feeling, you know?”
Fucking feelings. Only do you any good in the movies.
“So what about Brad?” I pressed. Otherwise known as Edward Morrow.
“Brad? Oh. Yeah-yeah. He was here last Saturday around then, you know…” A fatalistic hitch of the shoulders. “Balling me.”
“I figured as much,” I said with a sly glance at my dropped drawers. “Just needed to be sure, you know?”
She sidled back up to me with a husky chuckle, pulled my jeans to my ankles with the palm of her right foot. “So they hired you, huh? Her parents?”
“Yeah,” I replied, pressing my boy against her midriff. “I’m famous.” Afterward, I quizzed her more generally, knowing that she, more than anyone, would know who the town freaks were. We had pushed the two massage tables together for the purposes of our transaction. She answered me with her chin on my chest. Periodically her hand would crawl down to my groin to tweak and twiddle. I chalked it up to force of habit.
When she had heard about Jennifer-or “the other Jennifer” as she called her-the same questions had occurred to her. Some of her clients liked the rough stuff, but they tended to be the ones she thought the least likely to do anything “wonky,” as she put it.
“No one much fucks with me,” she said, tossing a negligent thumb in the direction of the hall that led off the kitchen-to the bedrooms, I suppose.
“Why’s that?”
“Because my brother’s always out back, playing his video games.”
“Brother?”
“Well, stepbrother. Jerome. Nobody fucks with Jerome.”
“Could you introduce me to him?”
“Not unless you want to fuck wi-”
That was when the riff from “Back in Black” began wailing in miniature from my pants where they lay crumpled. My cellphone.
“Sorry,” I said, peeling myself from Jenny’s sweaty side. “I’m on the clock, you know.”
She just snorted. “Me too.”
God, I love hookers. Almost as much as I love the drugs that make them hook. It was making my skin itch just knowing that somewhere near, beneath the couch or in a cupboard or drawer, there was a bag of goodies.
According to the display, it was Molly. “Yep,” I said into the phone.
“Disciple. Disciple! Where are you?”
“At a rub-and-tug,” I answered in a querulous Where-else-would-I-be tone.
“A rub and what?”
“A rub-and-tug. You know, a jack shack.”
“Spare me the bullshit, Disciple,” she snapped, all, like, time-is-money and shit. “You need to meet me at the corner oflnkerman and Kane. “
“What? Why?”
“Nolen. He’s found a severed finger. “ A classic pan-in-zoom-out moment. Molly, it turned out, owned a police scanner, an item I had thought about getting several times but had just never seemed to muster the scratch for. Bad dice and the odd Jenny will do that to you, I suppose. Apparently while I was out busy investigating my vices, she was in her room watching CSI reruns and keeping tabs on what the state-sanctioned professionals were doing.
“Wait,”she snapped. “Wait!”
I could hear her scanner squawking in the background…
“Shit-shit-shit,” she gasped, her voice taut with genuine fear.
“What? What’s going on?”
“Another one,”she exclaimed. Frantic. She was genuinely frantic. “They found another finger just a couple ofblocks away!”
“How?” I asked, hopping with one leg in my jeans. Jenny’s laughter told me I had forgotten to put on my boxers. Bouncing around, my dick flopping like a tassel. Fuck it, I would go commando. “Did they say anything about how?”
“I can’t talk now, Disciple,” she called over my stream of muttered curses. “I gotta be out there. I’m going. I’ll meet you, ’kay?”
“Molls!” was all I managed before the line went dead.
It’s strange. I had no bonus arrangement with the Bonjours, so it really didn’t matter whether I was instrumental to what happened or not-I would get paid no matter what. And yet, beneath the move-move-move urgency, there was this crushing sense of failure…
I had known that she was dead all along, hadn’t I?
I kissed Jenny full on the lips, left her standing naked with the full roll of bills in her left hand and my boxers hanging from her right. I suffered a pang of remorse driving away. I had really liked those boxer shorts: a National Geographic number depicting The Whales of the World. They even sported a blue whale arching across the fly, boding the appearance of the purple.
Forgotten gauchies. As good an excuse as any, I supposed, to find my way back to 113 Omeemee. My phone began riffing literally the second I shut the car door. It was Albert-and about fucking time.
“Heeeey! ” he cried over the sound of music and voices. “Disciple, he- heee… Didn’t think I would catch you. What you doing so late, man?”
He was more than a little drunk, I could tell.
“Jerking off to War and Peace. I always get wood when the French are defeated. You?”
Breathless laughter. Great, I thought. Albert was one of those guys who became cool on a blood alcohol gradient. His cat’s-ass tone told me he thought he was pretty much the coolest thing going, which meant he’d hiked a good distance up shit-face hill.
“Impromptu grad party,”he said. “Talkingbullshit. Scoping hotties-you know how it is… ”
“So what di-”
“Smoked the last of that green,” he interrupted. “If you know what I mean.”
A mental frown. “I’m sure I can hook you up.”
“Bonus! You put the Weeeee! into weed,, you know that? ”
He found this pretty funny. Over his laugh I heard a young feminine voice say, “Is that your guy? Is that your guy?” in the background. “He’s a riot! “ I heard Albert reply.