The girl on the bed was wearing a baby-doll nightdress. Even her makeup couldn’t hide the fact that she wasn’t long past owning a baby doll as well. Twelve or thirteen, he thought. Dark roots showed in her blond hair.
‘This is Anya,’ said the woman. ‘Anya, say hello to Frederick.’
‘Hi,’ said Anya, and even in that one word he could hear her foreignness. One side of her mouth lifted, but nobody would have termed it a smile.
‘Hi,’ said the visitor, but he sounded doubtful.
‘Is there a problem?’ said the woman.
‘She’s not what I ordered after all,’ he said.
Immediately, the woman’s tone changed, but she tried to stay on the right side of polite. ‘We spoke on the phone,’ she said. ‘I took down the details myself. You asked for a blonde.’
‘She’s not blond. She dyes her hair. I can see her roots.’
Anya’s eyes moved from face to face, trying to follow the conversation. She could tell that the visitor was unhappy, but no more. She didn’t like it when they started out unhappy. It usually made what followed that much harder. She pulled her legs closer to her body and wrapped her arms around them. She rested her chin on her knees, which made her look younger still. There were rubbers on the nightstand beside her, and a box of tissues.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the woman, ‘but the agreement was made. Look, once the lights go down you won’t hardly notice the difference, and not where it matters.’ She grinned lasciviously. ‘Now, if you’d like to take a shower-’
‘I don’t want a shower,’ he said. ‘I want my money back.’
All pretense of courtesy disappeared from the woman. Her upper lip involuntarily curled into a feral snarl, like a dog giving a final warning before it bites.
‘That’s not going to happen. You paid for the hour. You can play Parcheesi with her if you like, or talk about how your day has been, or you can just take a walk right back out the door and go someplace else. The choice is yours, but the money stays here.’ She made one last effort at being conciliatory. ‘Look, honey, why argue and spoil a beautiful encounter? You’re going to have a good time.’
‘You told me that already.’
‘She’s a nice girl. You’ll like her.’
‘I don’t care if she’s Miss American Pie. She’s not what I ordered.’ He took out his cell phone. ‘Maybe I should call the police.’
The woman backed away from him. ‘Rudy!’ she shouted. ‘We have a problem.’
The closed door at the end of the hall opened, and he heard the TV more clearly. There was a hockey game on. He didn’t know who was playing. He took no interest in the sport. Only white people truly appreciated hockey, and that was because they didn’t know any better.
The man who emerged was wearing track pants, sneakers, and an oversized Yankees shirt. He was in his late twenties, and gym-toned. His dark hair was neatly cut. He looked like a college student on spring break, except for the Llama tucked into the front of his pants. It had pearl grips, and a chrome finish that caught the light.
Rudy sidled up the hall, pausing at the bathroom door. He hooked his right thumb into the band of his sweatpants, close to the butt of the gun, and leaned against the doorjamb. He looked bored. The visitor figured Rudy wasn’t very bright. A bright man would have been alert for danger. Rudy was too used to hustling underage girls and overweight johns. The visitor was neither.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’ said Rudy. His eyes swiveled lazily to the woman.
‘He says the girl isn’t what he ordered. He wants his money back.’
Rudy spat out a laugh and gave the visitor his full attention. ‘What do you think we are, man, Sears? We don’t do returns, and we don’t do refunds. Now, you can stay and have a good time with Anya or you can take a cab over to Hunts Point and see if they might have what you’re looking for. The cash stays here, though.’
‘I want my money.’
Rudy changed tack. ‘What money? I don’t see no money here. This money, did it have your name on it? The Federal Reserve, they make it out to you personally? I mean, I got money, but I don’t think it’s yours. You didn’t bring no money in here. You just came to visit, have a little fun. I don’t recall no money changing hands. Bro, money changing hands for pussy – that’s illegal. You ought to be careful what you say. Now, your time is ticking away. I was you, I’d go colorblind for the rest of the hour and just enjoy myself. So, what do you say?’
The visitor seemed to consider for a moment. ‘I still think I should call someone,’ he said. ‘This really isn’t very satisfactory at all.’ His finger hovered over the keys on the bulky black cell phone.
The woman moved farther away from him and stood behind Rudy.
‘Prick,’ she said. ‘You’re a jerk, you know that? Coming in here and wasting our time. You deserve to get your ass kicked.’
‘I’m warning you,’ said Rudy. ‘You need to put your phone away and get out of here right now.’
Rudy’s hand moved closer to the butt of the gun, but he still didn’t draw it. Maybe he wasn’t so inept after all, the visitor thought. The old axiom about never pulling a gun that you didn’t intend to use sprang to mind. Either Rudy was prepared to kill him, in which case his hesitancy was linked to his understanding of the finality of the act, or he wasn’t prepared to fire, in which case he was hesitating because he was afraid. The visitor believed that the latter was probably the case, although if it turned out to be the former then, well, he could deal with that as well.
‘You know what General Patton said about pearl-handled grips?’ said the visitor. ‘He said that only a New Orleans pimp would carry a pearl-handled gun. Guess he was wrong. Looks like shitty New York pimps carry them too.’
Now Rudy did reach for the gun, and the visitor shifted the cell phone in his hand. Two barbed darts shot from the tip, penetrating Rudy’s shirt and attaching themselves loosely to the skin on his chest as fifty thousand volts coursed through his body. Rudy fell to the floor, convulsing madly. The woman ran for the living room, screaming for help, while the visitor appropriated Rudy’s pimp gun for himself.
A second man appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, bigger than Rudy but dressed the same way. His hair was shaved tight, and he had blunt, Slavic features. Unlike Rudy, he was sufficiently alert to have a gun in his hand already, but not prepared enough to make himself a smaller target. The two shots from Rudy’s gun hit him in the chest. He held on to the frame of the door, then collapsed to his knees. He raised the gun again, and the third shot flung him back, his knees trapped beneath him, his body convulsing just as Rudy’s had, but this time to a different end.
The visitor kicked the dead man’s gun away and kept moving. The living room was empty, but he could hear the woman in the kitchen. He followed the sounds and found her searching in the silverware drawer. He kicked at the drawer, trying to slam it closed on her hand, but she was too fast. She came at him with the carving knife, but her arm was high, the blade raised to the level of her head, the tip arcing down. He stepped inside her reach and used his left forearm to force her hand against the wall while his right brought the gun down on the side of her head. He hit her twice and she slid to the floor, moaning. After checking that there was no one else in the apartment, he went back to the hallway and saw that Rudy had crawled into the bathroom. Carefully, the visitor approached the open door. Rudy had already removed the second.38 from under the sink when the visitor appeared in the doorway.
‘Don’t,’ said the visitor.
Rudy fired, but he was still shaky from the electric shock. The bullet took a chunk out of the plaster a foot to the right of the visitor’s body, and in response he emptied two shots from the Llama into Rudy, then tossed it aside. He entered the bedroom. The girl named Anya had crawled into a corner by the window, her hands on her ears.