“That’s putting it mildly,” I said.
“Because of the videos?” Malloy asked. I shrugged.
“Nah,” I said. “I mean, that too, but it started way before that. I figured if I was going to be branded as the Whore of Babylon anyway...” I sipped my weak, awful coffee. “I might as well get paid for it.”
Malloy waited to see if I would say anything else. I didn’t. I wasn’t ready to open up that can of worms for him or for anybody. It was all ancient history and besides, there just wasn’t any point in trying to explain to a man what it feels like to be the neighborhood slut, the girl with the bad reputation who lets boys do things to her and doesn’t even try to get a ring.
Girls back home never could stand the fact that I was different. Before I had tits, I was just a misfit. An outcast troublemaker who liked to read and watch horror movies and thought Mary and Jesus and all the saints were just made up to make us behave in school. They teased me and made fun of me, but they didn’t really give me much thought. Once the hormones kicked in, that’s when I became a genuine threat. I wasn’t just that I loved sex, it was the fact that I didn’t use it as a bargaining chip. I didn’t want to trade it for a house and a mess of kids, I actually enjoyed it for its own sake, because it felt good. For that, the girls all hated me. Boys on the other hand, they loved me. That is until reality kicked in and they traded me in for a more sensible, wife-worthy model.
Me, I didn’t want to be anybody’s wife. I saw my own mother, drowning her regrets in gallon-bottle red wine and watching herself fade away to nothing, alone in the empty kitchen every single night, and I didn’t want to be like her. I saw my older sister Denise go from a vibrant, intelligent young woman who wanted to travel and dreamed of becoming an opera singer to an exhausted, fat and shrewish mother whose entire world was about diapers and dishes and laundry while her husband stayed out all night screwing girls like me. My brothers’ wives, my few friends and many enemies from high school, one after the other, the females around me sank into the tar of motherhood and debt and responsibility. The boys settled into dead end, blue-collar jobs and the girls raised their babies and waited for them to come home from the bars. Like victims in a slasher film, they all went down, one after another, until the only ones left standing were me and my best friend Stacy Cooney.
Stacy and I were the two biggest sluts in school. As fellow pariahs often do, we formed an immediate alliance. She was a redhead, a tiny freckled thing with mosquito-bite tits and a big mouth. Unlike me, she was a hard drinker from a long line of Irish drinkers and could put away more straight liquor in one night than most guys twice her size. If you measured her from the crown of her teased up mane of red Irish curls to the bottom of her spike-heeled boots, she was my height, around five seven. Fresh out of the shower with bare feet, she was more like four eleven. Maybe 100 pounds, tops. She was my partner in crime. The first girl I ever kissed. She used to call me her getaway driver. We were like Siamese twins for the last year of high school and the two years that followed. We had some wild times, me and Stacy. Stacy loved guys in bands and there wasn’t a venue in the state of Illinois where she couldn’t get backstage. It had been her idea to hook up with an L.A. band and go to Hollywood to make dirty movies. Party with rock stars on the Sunset Strip, buy matching convertibles and never have to wear winter coats over our sexy outfits ever again. We had everything all planned out. A band from Los Angeles was coming through that June. We would take only one bag each, whatever money we had saved, and our best high-heeled boots. It was going to be a grand adventure. Then Stacy got knocked up.
She had no idea who the father was, but as cheerfully sinful as she had always been, she was genuinely terrified of going to hell if she had an abortion. Within a week of the failed pregnancy test, she had some sap all set to marry her and take care of the kid. All our foolish dreams meant nothing now that there was a baby to think about. Something about the resigned look on her face when she told me it was best if we didn’t hang out anymore hurt worse than any guy who’d ever dumped me.
I packed my things. I had to get out, before having a baby and settling down into the tar started sounding like a good idea to me, too.
I went to that concert alone and I got myself backstage. I threw everything in my arsenal at the handsome singer and he took the bait even though I knew he could see the hook. He was a good lover and he was gracious enough to let me hitch a ride with the band back to Los Angeles. I won’t kiss and tell, but that band went on to become hugely famous, then widely reviled and ridiculed, and then famous again. The singer and I stayed in touch; we’re still good friends. Not Stacy. I haven’t heard from her since the day she told me we couldn’t hang out anymore. Come to think of it, her failed pregnancy test would now be old enough to do porn.
“You done?” Malloy asked, pulling me gently back into the present.
I looked down at the remains of my fruit salad.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Right,” Malloy said, pulling out his wallet and signaling the waitress.
That reminded me of something I’d meant to do since I woke up in Ulka’s dungeon. Something that would make me feel just a tiny bit less dependent on Malloy. Something that would make me feel a little more like me again.
I’d kept a storage locker on Haskell and Roscoe by the Budweiser plant ever since the Northridge earthquake back in ’94. I had just bought my house the year before and luckily it didn’t suffer any major damage, but that quake scared the piss out of me. Hence, this storage locker. A secret stash of just-in-case that no one knew about but me. Even though I’d had no idea anything like this could ever happen, I’d still had it in my head that I needed the place to be a secret, so I’d rented it under a fake name. That was back when it was still easy to do that kind of thing, before the whole 9 /11 business. I paid yearly in cash and never caused any trouble. Kept a fat combination lock on it so there was no key to lose. Just in case.
Inside the storage locker was exactly the sort of junk you expect to find in storage lockers. A few boxes. Some books. An old lamp. A trio of vintage hats. A blocky toy robot that used to light up but didn’t anymore. An ugly, floral-print easy chair. Nothing to make a casual observer look twice. Nothing boost-worthy. But the boxes, marked with red Sharpie letters that read things like “Hot Rollers,” “Kitchen” and “Photos,” actually contained bottled water, military MRE rations, a Swiss army knife, a flashlight, extra batteries, a first aid kit and several rolls of toilet paper.
If you actually sat in that ugly chair, you’d find it extremely uncomfortable. The chair’s lumpy seat cushion had a zippered cover that could be removed for cleaning. The zipper was rusty and cantankerous but when you unzipped it, you would find several items stuffed in with the crumbling yellow foam rubber. First, a Saran-wrapped stack of cash adding up to two grand. Enough to smooth things out in a emergency where bank access was impossible, but not more than I could afford to lose if anything should happen to compromise this place. Then, if you reached in deeper, you’d encounter a more recent, post-9 /11 addition: a scruffy old Smith and Wesson .40 caliber pistol that wasn’t nearly as nice as my stolen Sig and about which I knew very little other than a disreputable acquaintance’s assurance that it was untraceable. I had never fired it. I cleaned and oiled it when I came to rotate out the water, batteries or food but in my mind it was really nothing but another piece of my just-in-case juju. I had been thinking earthquake, riots, terrorists. Never in a million years did I imagine that I would be planning on using that gun to commit premeditated murder.