He went up to the motel, noticing that the office was dark, which wasn’t surprising. It was almost four in the morning. He walked on down the row of motel units to the one with the Packard in front, and tried the door. It was locked, which didn’t faze him. He took one step back, took careful aim, raised one foot, and kicked the doorknob a good one.
As he’d supposed, the lock was pretty flimsy. The door flew open, and he walked on in. The light switch was beside the door. He flicked it on, closed the door behind him, and grinned at the wide-eyed girl sitting up in the bed.
“Hello, Saralee,” he said. “Surprised to see me?”
Eight
The kid was awfully nervous. He was about Vince’s age but looked a lot younger. His face was round and rosy like a highly polished apple. His eyes were the kind that were scared to look back when you looked at them. It was a shame, Vince thought, that you had to deal with people like this. But money was money. You couldn’t be too choosy, not when money was money and you needed it in a hurry.
“Hot as a pistol,” Vince went on, coaxing the boy, leading him gently by the nose. “Built like a bomb shelter. Young, too. Good stuff. You won’t regret it, believe me. Money well spent and all that. You know.”
“Gee,” the kid said. “I mean... gee.”
“And she’ll do anything,” said Vince, giving the kid a sly man-of-the-world grin. “Anything you want. Anything at all.”
“Anything?”
“Anything,” Vince emphasized. He would have sworn the stupid bastard’s mouth was beginning to water.
“Well,” said the kid. “I mean, twenty bucks is a lot of money. You can’t just reach out your hand and there’s twenty bucks.”
Vince reminded him that the motel where the kid staying with his folks cost more than that for a day. Then he went into another profound description of Saralee’s assets. That did it.
“I’ll get the money,” the kid said. “Hang on.”
Vince stood there with his face hanging out while the kid went to get the money. Maybe he’ll steal it from his old man, he thought. Or maybe he’ll just tell the old man Hey, gimme twenty bucks so I can get laid, and the old man’ll come across with the twenty.
It was a pretty horrible thought.
“I got it,” the kid said, returning. “Let’s get going. I mean, we might as well get it over with, don’t you think? I mean, there’s no point in wasting any time.”
Vince didn’t feel like talking anymore. He pointed at the Packard and the kid got in. Vince slipped behind the wheel, played games with the ignition, leaned on the accelerator and aimed the car at Saralee’s motel. The kid would be tossing another twenty bucks in the sack, and Saralee would be tossing another kid in the sack, and this should be cause for rejoicing. Somehow it wasn’t. Somehow he felt pretty cruddy.
It was, he reflected, damned hard work being a pimp.
Vince was standing outside the door, smoking a cigarette and listening to Saralee showing the kid what it was all about. If anybody had told him he’d be pimping in North Carolina, he would have laughed. But here he was, pimping in North Carolina. And what the hell was so funny?
When he broke in on Saralee, first she tried to explain, and then she tried to apologize, and finally she tried to seduce him. But this time her attempts at seduction were as ineffectual as her apologies and her explanations. Maybe he was growing immune to Saralee or something. Whatever it was, her body did nothing to change his mind.
At first he had wanted to beat the living crap out of her, but the phony rape bit with the tired old broad in Washington had taken it out of his system. He just didn’t feel up to slapping another woman. Some guys got their kicks that way, but he didn’t seem to be one of them. Besides, he’d come a long way. You don’t hitchhike all the way from New York to North Carolina just to knock some girl’s head in.
And there were more important considerations. The most important consideration was getting the car back to his old man, and this turned out to be impossible. Saralee wasn’t much of a driver. The Packard was a wreck to begin with, but she hadn’t bothered to put any oil into it. The poor heap knocked and rattled and huffed and puffed. It wouldn’t make Baltimore, much less New York. And if he gave the car back to his old man in that shape, he might as well hang himself.
That’s where the money came in. With enough money, he could fly back to New York and take a bus to the lake. His father would be annoyed, but he’d get back soon enough so that the old man wouldn’t exactly hit the roof. Then, with enough money, he could pay his father for the car. Make up some story about how it got wrecked, and hand his father a mittful of money. That might do the trick.
The problem, then, was money. He had the hundred bills from the Rape-Me Relic, and Saralee, he found out quickly, had almost three hundred of her own.
Which wasn’t enough.
It would cost him, say, a hundred dollars to get back to the lake. The car might bring a hot fifty bucks on the open market now, but his father would expect at least five hundred for it. And he didn’t dare sell the car.
The thing was, he and Saralee had a little less than four hundred between them. And he needed a bare minimum of six hundred — one hundred to get back to the lake and five hundred to pay for the car. Seven hundred would be more like it, and eight hundred would be fine, but six hundred would do in a pinch.
And if this wasn’t a pinch, nothing was.
The answer had been simple. Saralee would hustle for the money. She would stay in the room, and he would scout likely prospects and bring them to the room where she would accommodate them. He told Saralee about it, and she was against it, claiming that she would give it away to anybody but the idea of selling it repelled her.
“It’s the same as giving it away,” he told her. “Because I’ll be taking all the money. You won’t get a nickel of it.”
This didn’t placate her. But pretty soon she managed to see that she didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice in the matter. First of all, he took all of her clothes and put them in the trunk of the car. That left her naked, and restricted her movements to the immediate vicinity of the room itself. Then he told her precisely what she would look like after he got through with her if she didn’t do as expected. She shuddered a little.
Getting customers could have been easier, but it also could have been harder. Vince knew the type to work on. Kids his age, rich kids on vacation. Nice virginal type kids who wouldn’t make any trouble and who would pay plenty for a chance to be with Saralee. The South seemed to swarm with kids like that. They were all over the place.
The door opened and the kid walked out. He had a stupid grin all over his polished apple face. “Everything okay?” Vince asked him. “You get what you paid for?”
The kid nodded, still grinning, and headed off down the road. It was a good mile to the motel where he was staying and Vince started to offer him a ride. Then he decided the kid was so high on Saralee he could probably fly back.
Vince walked into the room, closing the door behind him. “That’s six of them,” he told her. “How’s it going? How’s the old machinery holding up?”
He expected her to be a little bitter, but she wasn’t. She smiled dreamily, running her hot hands over her hot body and purring like a kitten.
“Wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful. I never had so many boys at once before. One after the other. It’s wonderful.”
“Well,” Vince said. “Well, a few more and we can call it quits. We’ve got over five hundred now. As soon as we hit six, you can take it easy.”
“I am taking it easy,” she insisted. “This is fun. Hurry up and get some more, will you?”