They didn’t look good.
He gazed out the front picture window. He lived just down the road from the Lost Valley ski resort. In fact, he could see the small mountain – little more than a hill really – from right here on the sofa. He watched that mountain now, the bald ski runs bathed in morning sunlight, reds and oranges of fall mixed in with the evergreens along the edges of the trails.
Soon, another six weeks at most, the hill would be covered in snow. From his living room, he could watch the skiers glide down. Then, before he knew it, the scene would change yet again. The seasons passed faster and faster as he grew older. He was almost forty years old now, and it seemed like on Monday he would glance up that hill in green and sunny summertime, and on Tuesday a howling wind would blow powdery snow from the top of it.
Closer to home, his neighborhood sprawled out in what he liked to think of as the mountain’s shadow. It was a quiet neighborhood of small saltbox and ranch-style houses, not quite suburban, not quite rural. The neighborhood itself looked like it was leaning toward suburban – what with the houses just ten or twenty yards apart. But the pickup trucks with the gun racks and the sagging condition of some of the homes said the people were leaning toward rural.
He sipped his beer and watched Darren.
Darren sat sprawled in an easy chair. His shirt was off, revealing his well-muscled upper body. His sandy blonde hair was slicked back. He was drinking a beer, smoking a cigarette, sulking, touching the plaster the emergency room doctor had put across his nose, cursing to himself, and looking over his various bruises all at the same time.
Mr. Blue Eyes.
The moniker fit him perfectly. Nobody had eyes that were bluer than Mr. Blue Eyes. He had eyes of pale blue – like the sky, like a Caribbean lagoon. You could fall into his eyes, they were so blue. In fact, Hal knew that Darren wore contact lenses to give his eyes that color. There was nothing wrong with his eyes that needed correction – except their color: they were actually brown.
Darren had slept in the spare bedroom because he didn’t want to go home to his wife after the beating he took. Darren often slept in the spare bedroom. Sometimes he slept in there with the girls from photo shoots they did – a lot of the girls weren’t nearly as resistant as Lola to modeling with Darren. Sometimes he slept in there alone. Beating or no, Darren rarely wanted to go home to his wife.
“Gonna eat that bitch alive next time,” he said, almost to himself. He took a deep drag from his cigarette. “Yes sir, next time I surely am gonna do it to her.”
Hal smiled. “We’ll have to put a paper bag over your head, but okay.”
Darren’s handsome face winced as he gingerly rubbed a large purplish blot on the side of his thick neck. He smiled around the cigarette. “Man, she got me good right here.” The bruise looked like an octopus imbedded in his neck, trying to push its way out through the skin. It looked like somebody had hit him there with a baseball bat.
“Oh yeah, that’s the worst of it,” Hal said. “What’d she do there?”
“Kicked me as I was falling.” Darren took a big slurp of his beer. “Or maybe it was after I was down.” The two men glanced at each other for a moment, and burst out laughing. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way. Last night had been the worst screw-up they had experienced in their new careers. A couple of girls had almost escaped, at times, and one had even pulled a gun, which they talked her into dropping. But none so far had busted out with this Bruce Lee shit. That was the one thing they hadn’t expected.
Hal took a sip of his Budweiser as the laughter subsided. “Kid, we got our asses kicked by a little girl.”
“We sure did, partner.”
They lapsed into silence, and Hal looked around the room.
He had inherited this house from his mother years before, and there was no doubt he had let the place go to hell. It was in need of a woman’s touch, maybe. The furniture was old, the window blinds were moving toward ratty, the rugs were threadbare, and bordered scuffed wooden floors that had long since needed resurfacing. The kitchen cabinets were old – they had probably been put in during the 1940’s. Ditto the stove, although it still worked well. The refrigerator was only two years old, but that was because the last one had broken. Outside, the lawn did whatever the hell if wanted. Right now, in mid-October, it was long and going toward brown, slowly dying. Bits of paper and other assorted flying garbage had embedded itself here and there on the grass. Beneath the grass, especially near the rickety front porch, were empty beer cans that Hal and Darren had chucked while sitting on the porch and bullshitting.
If the house looked bad, Hal could take comfort in the fact that it looked no worse than any of the other houses in the area. A lot of people in that neighborhood were struggling. Hal could also take some comfort in the fact that he was not struggling. In fact, with the free house and the little bit of money he had squirreled away over the years, and the new business he and Darren had been working these past eleven months, Hal felt like he was doing just fine, thank you.
Right out of high school, Hal had gone in the military. For four years, he had seen his chunk of the world. He went to Louisiana, to the Philippines, to South Korea, to Germany. On leave he checked out Southeast Asia and lots of Europe. What did he learn from all that traveling? Apart from the eye-opening food choices, he learned there are whores wherever you go. Some are a little more expensive than others, but in general, they’re all pretty cheap if you get the right ones. Sometimes it’s out of the goodness of your heart that you pay them all – he learned that one, too.
But these photo-shoot girls were the best.
Hal had a guy down in Florida who could sell anything Hal could shoot. In fact, the guy wanted more all the time. Especially these modeling agency interview shoots. People went nuts for it, and the girls lined right up to participate. Hal put up these ads, these flyers, looking for women and men. When men called, he ignored them. He didn’t want men. He wanted girls.
Saying he wanted men made the girls think he really was planning on a calendar shoot, or a catalog shoot. When they found out otherwise, they didn’t usually complain. Instead, they went limp. They obeyed. It was like, “You want me to take my clothes off? Uh, okay. You want me to put that in my mouth? Uh, okay.” Girls were passive. It was in their nature.
Hell, maybe they even liked it.
After each shoot, he’d send them out with a “We’ll call you if we need you,” or “We’ll send you a check.” He hadn’t sent anyone a check yet, and nobody had complained. What were they going to say? Some of the girls really did seem to enjoy themselves. He figured the rest of them just tried to put it out of their minds.
In case of any future trouble, Hal took precautions. He moved the office around all the time, taking short leases. He had changed the name of the business three times so far. When he transferred the video from the Mini-DV tape to the computer, he always edited his own and Darren’s faces out of the movie.
Then he would upload it to a secure web site the guy in Florida kept for submissions. Like magic, the guy would send back money. It was fun, and they were starting to make a very decent living. But this whole episode with Lola, it could jeopardize everything.
“I don’t know if you’re just talking trash or not,” Hal said. “But we do have to go back down there and talk to Ms. Lola.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“She took the digital tapes, kid. We’re on there. A brawl like that, you can hardly say she was begging for it, then changed her mind later. She decides to go to the cops, how much more evidence are they gonna need? We need to get those tapes back.”
Darren shrugged. He blew a smoke ring. “I got no problem with seeing her again. I’ll look forward to it. You know how to find her?”
“Well, she filled out that release with her address. I still have it.”