Sort of an artist. Everybody in SoBe who isn’t sort of a model or sort of a photographer, is sort of an artist. Waitress, I get it. Or maybe a trust-fund parasite, playing at it. — Cool. . Where are you from?
— Minnesota. A town called Potters Prairie in Otter County.
Are you fucking kidding me? — Right. . I’ll bet it’s a pretty part of the world.
— Yes, Sorenson says, and starts talking about Potters Prairie, before going back to the fucking causeway incident, which seems to have scarred that fat bitch more than it has me. — I can’t believe how strong you were on the Julia Tuttle. I need some of that strength and determination.
— Yes, but you aren’t a vampire and I’m not a blood bank, I snap. I’ve long recognized I can ride out an occasional contemptuous outburst, as my clients, in common with most of the fat, possess a considerable ability to edit out the uncomfortable. — Inner strength and focus is in all of us. My job is to help bring it out and develop it. To enable you find that explosive part of yourself that you are, for some reason, keeping buried, I tell her, and glance at the clock on the wall, suddenly anxious to get away from this social leech. — Right, I should go.
Sorenson rocks on the balls of her feet, evidently wanting me to hang around. — Oh, yes. . right. You, um, didn’t tell me where you were from?
No dice, fat girl; some of us have lives. — Boston originally. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go, I tell her, throwing my stuff into my bag, — and you really should shower now before you start to cool down too much under the air conditioning, and I head toward the exit, only whiplashing back to chide the crestfallen chubster, — Remember, watch what you eat!
Outside, there’s a sweet, cooling ocean breeze, and I go at a brisk trot across Flamingo Park, wanting to put as much distance between myself and that social predator as possible. Then, at the top end of Lenox, I see a grubby fuck with a camera dangling from his neck, hanging around outside my apartment block. What the fuck is this prick doing here? The show is long over! There’s always some lone loser trying to work an angle, some fucking intrusive psycho. .
Slowing down, I walk up quietly behind him. I tap his shoulder. The greasy prick turns around. — Lucy, he shouts, reaching for his camera.
I tear it out of the cocksucker’s hand, the band slipping over his head, and hurl it into the road. On impact, a small black piece snaps off it. — FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!
— My fucking cam— He looks at me in horror, then runs to retrieve the battered device.
As he cradles it in the street, as if it were the child victim of a hit-and-run, I take the opportunity to get in through the front door, a barrage of insults shrieking behind me.
In the apartment, I head straight for the shower. I touched that paparazzi creep’s shoulder and could feel the grubbiness from his filthy cum-splattered and nicotine-caked paw on that fucking camera. I’m just drying off when I get a call. — Lucy, it’s Lena Sorenson.
Fuck. Like, already, dude? It was evidently a mistake to give this creepy little porker my number. — Yes? I sharply intone.
— I think you should switch on the TV. . Channel 6.
I comply with the Porky Princess of Potters Prairie (seriously, who the fuck comes from a place called that?) and spark the TV into action. The depressed set finally kicks in. I have a better-quality small-screen portable in my bedroom, but the picture is way too tiny. An anchor, whose face is almost as stiff as her lacquered hair and shoulder pads, is recounting the story of Sean McCandless, the wimpy gunman I disarmed. Between the images on the screen and Sorenson’s breathless commentary in my ear, the disturbing picture coalesces. My blood increasingly chills as the nippy air blasts from the vents above onto my wet skin. It emerges that McCandless was abused by a pedophile ring when he was a kid in foster homes. Those guys he was pursuing were both sex offenders who lived in a homeless colony under the Tuttle Causeway. I shiver, then start to convulse, holding the towel tight to me. I saved one, possibly two monsters, and sent down this poor kid who was only out for revenge after some sick-fuck priest ripped his baby-boy ass apart.
It gets worse. As Sorenson’s warbling commentary fades out, two talking heads appear onscreen, both of them candidates for the forthcoming congressional elections. Ben Thorpe and Joel Quist are the archetypal worst-case Democrat and Republican. Thorpe is a well-meaning but ineffectual, flatulent-mouthed, carpetbagging Ivy League asshole, while Quist is a rabid, fascist, sanctimonious, Bible-bashing prick, schooled in spewing out populist soundbites. It’s hard to work out which one I hate the most. They are debating gun control and Thorpe’s defending my bravery, while Quist, agreeing, then says, — Though I’d like to ask that young lady, if she knew then what she knows now, would she do the same?
— Oh my God. . I hear myself say out loud. What the fuck. . I didn’t know they were pedophiles. . the guy was shooting a fucking gun!
— Well, that’s an interesting thought, simpers Ms. Botox, so firmly embedded in Quist’s corner that he has to be fucking her, — what would Lucy Brennan, the so-called Julia Tuttle Causeway heroine, think right now?
About what?What difference. . fuck. .
And I realize that Lena Sorenson’s soft voice is still droning on in my ear, though I can’t make out what she’s saying. I’m just so fucking livid at being dragged into all this bullshit. I’m responding with automatic “mmm’s” and “yeah’s.” I can’t talk to this maneuvering bitch. I need to think, so I put the phone down. I sit watching the other features, these Siamese twins again, and then I rise, drying myself properly and putting on a tee and some shorts.
A few moments later the intercom goes and I’m ready to bawl out this next stalking creep, probably that photographer asshole, but it’s Sorenson! Her voice is rendered metallic and scratchy by the device. — I jumped in the car and got here as soon as I could!
I don’t even recall agreeing to her coming here, but there’s nothing to do but buzz her in.
I open the front door to hear her slowly climbing the stairs. Sorenson, even smaller than I remember, swings into the corridor and waddles toward me. I move into the apartment, leaving the door ajar. She raps the door with her knuckles as she enters, looking around my tiny space in a slightly disparaging way. Then she says, — You’re gonna be under siege for a spell. Come over to my house, have some dinner. I feel so responsible, giving them that phone video. .
She’s right, that creep whose camera I busted wasn’t a straggler, he was the fucking vanguard. I need to get out of here and I’m fucked if I can think of any reason not to accept. I pull on some gym shoes and we get downstairs. Stepping outside, all I hear are insect clicks exploding around me like gunfire, and shouts. — LUCY! LUCY!
They’re all back! And the van for the TV news, fuck knows what channel, is already here! Sorenson did bring serious heat, and those politician assholes have turned it right back up! I want to double back to the apartment, but some bastards have sneaked round and positioned themselves between us and the front door. — Just wait a darn minute. . Sorenson protests feebly, sounding all schoolmarm under stress, as I see the rancid fuck whose camera I trashed, firing off a Kalashnikov round on a substitute device, with a zoom lens attached. At least there’s one asshole who knows not to get too close. — Ignore them, Lucy, Sorenson says, wide-eyed with fear, grabbing my hand, pushing through toward her car. The rest aren’t so shy; a buffed, tanned faggot of a reporter sticks his mike in my face and asks me, now that I know the story of McCandless and Ryan Balbosa and Timothy Winter, the two pedophiles, would I do the same thing again?