“... No, you listen to me, Karen, that’s not going to happen, you understand? I won’t stand still why you try that kind of shit with me.”
He got up and used the bathroom. When he stepped out, McLaughlin was sitting on the edge of the bed in her cloth robe, hunched forward, arms across her upper thighs like a player waiting to get called back into the game. He sat next her her, putting an arm around her shoulders.
“Can I help with anything?”
She made a sound in her throat. “I could lie to you and tell you it’s nothing,” she began, “but you might as well know now.” She regarded him for a moment. “I was talking to my wonderful ex — mother-in-law. A woman who would make Big Bird slap the shit out of her.” She chuckled scornfully.
“This involve a child?” he asked, having also noticed last night an assortment of toys in a cardboard box in a corner of the living room.
“Yes. My daughter Farley.”
“Farley?”
“Jeff had a good buddy who lost his legs over there. She’s just two and a half and, well, you can see I’m not exactly living the O.C. lifestyle.”
“Who is around here?” He gave her a squeeze.
She jutted her chin in a westerly direction. “Over in Rossmoor they are. Them and their wall.”
“Screw ’em,” Randolph said. “They think they shit gold.”
She snuggled closer to him, putting a hand on his thigh. “Jeff’s mother, Karen, has recently stepped up her alleged concern about how tough it is for me to feed and raise Farley on my own. How she can provide for her and all that. Her third husband, not Jeff’s father, owned a firm that supplied some kind of guidance system for missiles. Anyway, he dropped dead of a stroke and left her sitting pretty in a mortgage-free McMansion in Irvine. That’s where Farley is now.” She rubbed his thigh and, eyeing him, continued, “I didn’t plan on seducing you, Avery. But Karen suddenly showed up yesterday when I went to pick up Farley from the sitter after work. And, well, she demanded time with her granddaughter. She lords it over me, what with her paying for the child care and other things for Farley.”
She scooted over to her pressboard nightstand, opened a drawer, and took out a digital print. She handed it across to Randolph, who smiled at the photo of a bright-eyed toddler held aloft by her beaming mother. She took it back, lingered on it, then returned it to the drawer.
“So I was just a way for you to blow off steam? A revenge schtupp aimed at your mother-in-law?”
She shoved him playfully and clambered on top of him as he lay on his back, wrapping her in his arms. “How observant of you, Dr. Phil.” They kissed eagerly as he undid her robe.
On a Thursday evening several days later, they lay in bed in Randolph’s apartment near the racetrack. Intermingled yells of delight and disappointment could be heard through a cracked sliding window over the bed as the last race finished.
Randolph dialed the radio from the news on the rock station Lori had put on to the jazz station from the college campus in Long Beach. “Suddenly,” a McCoy Tyner number, was in midplay. Randolph let his mind drift as the pianist-composer did his thing.
“You bet much?” she asked, laying partially on top of him. His finger gently followed Tyner stroke for stoke on her shapely butt.
“Now and then I go over there, but I play the ponies like I know poker, not too damn good.” He began kneading her flesh, getting aroused.
She nuzzled his neck. “What if you could make about thirty thousand on a sure thing?”
“You know a horse doppler?”
“I know where to get sixty, maybe seventy thousand taxfree dollars. Half for you and half for me, Avery. Between your couple of nights a week at the Seaside and substitute music teaching, you’re not exactly living la vida loca either.”
He stopped rubbing and focused. “What are you talking about, Lori?”
“Remember I told you about Emerald Valley?”
“The dog food company.”
“The owner, Brice, he’s an old hippie, still smokes marijuana, gives his money to saving the rain forest and all that crap.”
“Okay. But I’m not comprehending.”
“He has a safe in his office. He’s still down with the people, don’t trust the system, so he’s always kept cash around, different places, you see? One of them is his office cause he’s always got some burned-out acid head or old surfing bro falling by for a touch.” She paused, placing her hand firmly on his chest. “Even gives it up to an ex-employee or two. I had to go see him for a loan and he’s always had a thing for me. Gave me a handful of those Cialis pills, saying to leave a trail of them through the forest and he’d find his way to me. Laughing and having a good time.” Her tone had frosted.
“This about keeping Karen at bay?”
“She told me she’s going to initiate, her words, legal action. If I just show her I can afford a lawyer, she’ll back down. I know how her wormy mind works. She’s cheap in so many ways.”
“Why not ask Brice for a loan? Sounds to me like he’d do it for you and not sweat when you could pay him back. The good fight and all that.”
She pulled slowly on his limp penis. “Because he’d want something in return, Avery. Brice is a freak, get it? He’s been in trouble in the past for beating off in his office in front of females. He’d want me to do kinky things to him regularly for repayment. Do you want me to do that?” She started to stroke him slowly. His breath got short as he grew hard. “I might be willing to be a thief, but I’m no ho.”
She continued with her handjob. “Unless you’re going to bitch up. Turn your head when I have to shove a studded dildo up his ass and hear him scream ‘Mommy.’ Make like I’m not your woman.” She took his balls in her hand.
“Not likely,” he groaned, as he put his fingers to her throat and applied pressure. She gasped and he leveraged her under him.
“Fuck me rough, baby,” she demanded — and he did.
The plan wasn’t elaborate. It was straightforward and textbook efficient. Emerald Valley Premium Dog Foods was in a 17,000-square-foot, one-story landscaped building in a cul-de-sac off an industrial park not far from a 605 Freeway off-ramp. Lori McLaughlin had made a Sunday after-hours rendezvous to get the money from a thrilled Brice Hovis. McLaughlin told Randolph he’d insisted that she think of the loan as a long-term investment in her and her daughter’s futures, and to come by the office to finalize the deal.
She knew the layout of the factory, and once she got Hovis wound up, she’d explained with a sneer, she’d leave a side door to the parking lot, used by employees when they had to work overtime, unlatched.
Dressed in overalls obtained that day from a thrift store and wearing rubber dishwashing gloves, Avery Randolph gained access to the facility at the appointed time. Inside, he quickly spotted the thin strip of light coming from the office door at the far end the plant. He eased forward on tennis shoes also purchased at the thrift store. His outfit would be burned afterward.
Randolph passed belt feeders, tall stainless steel devices with large conical vats atop them, automated packaging stations, and heavy machinery bolted to the concrete floor with drive shafts that led to partially encased circular rotors he assumed were used to chop and grind the meat Emerald Valley turned into dog food. Stilled circulation fans were set at various strategic locations in the ceiling.
McLaughlin had explained to him that the business, like a lot of pet food manufacturers, bought rendered meat from elsewhere that was shipped to them, along with grains and cereals from other suppliers. Randolph was pleasantly surprised that the air smelled like cheeseburgers.