A leg snaked around my thigh. I lifted her onto my cock. We fucked standing up, jerking and balancing and moaning at each other, straining in the warm air. Sweat ran between her tits and over my stomach. Our faces were wet with spit. Her kisses fell in smears from my forehead to my chin.
I pushed my middle finger into her ass, as far as it would go. She spasmed and we almost fell. I pumped come then lowered her to the floor and stood over her looking down, the last of my jism dripping onto her belly.
Later. On the bed, nighttime L.A. scouting the room—sodium light and dry air that felt freshly washed even though it carried, as always, its signature scents: eucalyptus, exhaust, pizza, doughnuts, coffee, and, even this far inland, something that would have been missing without the sea.
Her name was Bella and she was a few years past thirty. Her skin was expensively healthy and her clothes were expensively tailored. But money had been obvious from the start.
And beyond this, I could feel something intangible—her power, a sense of otherness that rose from her like a dark perfume. There, but potently indefinable.
The sheets were wet. We stank of fish. I blew cigarette smoke at the ceiling.
“How did you find me?”
“Your friend gave me the number of your agency.”
“My friend?”
“The man you were with.”
“He was paying.”
“Obviously.”
“You must have been impressed.”
“I have the luxury of being able to act on my feelings.”
“And what are they?”
She didn’t answer, just looked around the room, then:
“Are you really this poor?”
“Poorer.”
“Why?”
“Because I am. What do you mean?”
Bella twisted to arrange her pillow then propped herself against the wall. While her back was toward me I noticed she had a tattoo at the base of her spine. In the dim light it looked similar to the scarab Karen had on her shoulder blade. She waved at the apartment.
“You’re good-looking and smart. You could do better.”
“Everyone’s good-looking and smart in California. What’s that saying about wishes?”
“What do you mean?”
“If wishes were horses …”
“… beggars would ride?”
“Yeah, that’s it. You have money, obviously.”
“Yes.”
“Where from?”
“My mother’s family, back a few generations. Water and oil. I’m not talking anything like that, though, just something better than you have.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
“Do you want to stay a hustler?”
“It’s a distraction. But after the other night I don’t expect I’ll be working much.”
“Distraction is important to you?”
“Isn’t it for everyone? Sometimes?”
“How far do you go for it?”
There was something about her eyes when she asked this that made me feel a little out of my depth.
“Oh, just the usual perversions.”
“I don’t think there is anything usual about you at all. You have a small life, but you want a bigger one, I can tell. And it’s possible, Jack. It could happen. All it takes is the courage to push yourself further than the rest of the sheep.”
Maybe she thought she’d got a little too intense because she paused for a second, then went on like it hadn’t been important.
“What would you do if you had your choice of jobs?”
“Something on TV, I guess.”
“What, exactly?”
“I’d like to present a show on movie stars, one of those ‘Hollywood Report’ things. I’ve done a course in telehosting.”
“I don’t watch a lot of TV myself.”
“Too lowbrow for you?”
“Not really, I just find other people pointless.”
She split later that night.
And five minutes after she’d gone, Ryan arrived. Opened the door with his G-man tool kit and walked straight in. I didn’t bother to get out of bed. He sat on the edge of the table.
“What the fuck do you want?”
“And we had such fun together last time.”
“I’m not in the mood for another girlie show.”
“This is more in the line of business. I’ve been talking to some of the hookers who worked the same patch as Karen, turns out she was pally with a couple. Wanna take a stab at what they told me? No? Well, it seems she was loaded just before she disappeared. You know what I’m saying? She was in possession of a disproportionately large amount of cash. Didn’t say where she got it, but she flashed it around plenty. Don’t tell me you don’t know anything about it.”
“We weren’t close at the end. Whatever money she had was her own business.”
“Let’s talk about that shiny slope-wagon you drive.”
“What about it?”
“Jackie …”
Ryan put on a dangerous face and flexed his fingers.
“Okay. All right. The car was a present. She bought it for me.”
“Yeah. DMV lists it as being registered in your name only eight days before she was found. You didn’t think that might be important? Like it couldn’t possibly have something to do with what happened to her?”
“I don’t see what buying a car could—”
“I’m talking about the money, fuckhole. Where did she get it?”
“I don’t know. The last time I saw her she split because I was hassling her to tell me. We had a fight about it.”
Ryan shook his head and moved to sit down next to me on the mattress. I shifted closer to the wall.
“Jackie, seems like every day turns up something else that don’t look good for you. You shoulda told me about the money.”
He took hold of the sheet and lifted it so he could look at my body. I knocked his hand away. He smirked and stood up.
“Got anything to drink?”
“Jesus, don’t you ever buy your own?”
“Not when I got friends like you.”
He went into the kitchen and came back with Southern and two glasses, filled both of them, and stuck one out at me. I didn’t take it at first, but he kept it there until I did.
“I owe you for checking me into that motel.”
I didn’t say anything, just stared past him out the window at a night that had no depth to it—a black sheet that looked like it was going to hang there forever. He sipped his drink for a while, then cleared his throat delicately.
“I saw a little thing on the drag the other night. Maybe you can help me with it.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You and someone in a black Jaguar.”
“A black Jag? I don’t remember …”
“Yeah, you do. You talked for a couple of minutes, then you got in and drove to Beverly Hills. It didn’t look like your average faggot pickup.”
“You’re still following me?”
“I put my heart into my work. Who was it? Where did you go?”
“If you were following you ought to know.”
“The Beverly Hills Patrol thought I looked suspicious trailing such a fine car and pulled me over. By the time we straightened things out I’d lost sight of you.”
“Jesus, you’re so far gone even other cops don’t recognize you.”
“Careful, Jackie.”
“Well, fucksake, you don’t think that’s ridiculous?”
Ryan shrugged.
“They’re a private outfit. Answer the question.”
“Shit, it was just some guy who wanted a blow job. We parked near Sunset, I did it, then he split. That’s all.”
“Name? Description?”
“I don’t spend a lot of time looking at their faces, you know? Why didn’t you check his license plate?”
“I did—no trace. Which means the plates were false. Which means I want to know even more.”
“Okay, try this one. Who was the slit you had in here. Arrived about nine.”
“You’ve been out there that long?”
“Like I said, I put my heart into it.”
“She could have been visiting anyone in the building.”
“But she wasn’t. Too much money to hang around a place like this, something odd about it. And if it’s odd and in this building, my money says it’s you.”
“I do some work for an agency. They sent her over. I don’t know anything about her.”
“Looked like a good fuck.”
“She was.”
“Which way did you give it to her?”
“Fucksake.”
“Come on, Jackie. From behind, like a couple of dogs? Woof, woof, woof. Well? Don’t tell me you just got on top.”
“We did it different ways.”
“Like?”
“Jesus. Standing up, bent over the table, in bed with her on top.”
“That’s better. How about when she sucked you off? Did she swallow, or did she make you squirt it over her tits? I like it when they let it dribble down their chin.”
“Can we drop it, Ryan?”
“Bet I know more about her than you do.”
“Sure.”
“You know her pussy, but I know her name and where she lives. You see what she was driving? Beemer, eight series. I ran the plates through DMV. She’s a Malibu baby, prime-sector address. Would you like that info, Jackie? Huh?”
“What for? It was work.”
I would have liked her address, for sure, but I was fucked if I was going to ask fatso for anything.
“How about I get her number and you call her up and ask her back for a freebie and I set it up so we can video it?”
“Fuck off.”
“That bitch looks like she could lay out plenty.”
I put my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. I heard Ryan pour himself another drink. I wished I was someone famous enough to have lawyers and bodyguards to make him go away.
“Maybe you’re right. A scam like that takes a bit of planning.”
I kept my eyes closed and didn’t respond. After a while he left.
* * *
Early A.M. In my room with the blinds shut tight. Cigarette smoke in the air and an awful silence outside. I lay on my back with the lights off, straining to hear the sound of traffic—a police siren, a gun shot, anything to let me know there was a world out there and that I was still part of it, that I wasn’t as completely alone as I felt.
I had come on my hands, my thighs, over my belly. The crowbar picture was on the floor by the mattress. I’d lost count of how many times I’d jerked off over it. All I knew was that my dick had finally gone soft and that the five Lorazepam I’d stuck under my tongue an hour before had started to take hold. I couldn’t see the picture too clearly anymore but it was burned into my head—heavy white flesh, black steel jammed up her ass. If I hadn’t had the pills I wouldn’t have been able to stand the desire to see what her body actually felt like. I imagined it as cold and smooth and quiet.
An hour after dawn I fell asleep.
Chapter Seventeen
Rex was up, way up. A brittle high-powered energy that kept him shifting in the seat of the Porsche like his legs wanted to run off by themselves. Dusk. Chasing the yellow burn of the headlights through poorly lit residential streets near the ass-end of Burbank. We had the top off and the stereo cranked up. The air blew in across us like a high-speed dream. All the ingredients for a scene from a teen movie—high school buddies tearing it up after the prom. But there was none of that wild innocence in either of us. I was living in a twilight world. And Rex was rollercoasting between the poles of a deepening emotional imbalance.
We were out for smack. Or rather, Rex was. I was along for the ride and maybe a taste. Outside the car rows of clapboard houses slipped by, neat and well-kept, but you knew every waking hour lived in them was sucked dry by the battle to make ends meet—front gardens with small dusty lawns and the odd desiccated gum tree, waist-high chain-link fences, small cars parked on short concrete driveways, kids here and there, booted out of the house so dad or mom could get an hour’s peace before the terror of dinnertime.
Rex drove fast, slinging the car around corners, not because we were racing to make a connection, but because there was no other way he could off-load the brittle anxiety that rode him.
“This guy better be in, man, he better be in. I feel like I’m going to burst.”
“I’ve got downers at my place.”
“Not good enough tonight, not anesthetic enough.”
“The Prothiaden didn’t work out?”
“It works, man, it works. Why the fuck you think I’m like this? Spins your fucking head around. Up. Down. I can’t tell anymore.”
“Stop taking it.”
“Doesn’t make any difference. This does, though.”
He stuck his arm out so the sleeve of his shirt pulled back. He had a number of small bruises on the inside of his forearm. Nothing you could call tracks, but I was surprised they were there at all.
“You want to get sharper needles.”
“Yeah, man, that’s what I want. Sharper needles, bigger bags of smack, something that’ll suck my brain out, wash it clean, and stick it back. I want a million things, man, a million things and just one. I just want it to stop.”
I’d like to think I would have said something sensitive at this point. But I didn’t get the chance. Rex had just rocketed around another corner into a street that was mostly empty lots and looked deserted. He was working the stick and doing some mad thing with his head, shaking it like he had a maggot trying to eat from one ear to the other, when a boy about nine years old ran into the street chasing a volley ball. If he’d been driving normally he might have had a chance at stopping. As it was he didn’t have time to hit the brakes until after the impact.
The boy came up over the hood, hit the windscreen, and flew. I had an absurd shot of him through the open roof, cart-wheeling against the dark sky, head down, blond hair in a fan around his face. Then the brakes took hold, no screech, they were ABS, and Rex slewed the car to the curb. For a moment he sat there gripping the wheel, eyes screwed shut, as though he thought that with enough effort he could close down his senses. Then we were out, running back along the road to the body.
The boy, incredibly, lay straight out, faceup, legs together. The only thing that made it look like he hadn’t just laid down for a nap was the way his left arm was twisted sharply behind his back.
But he was dead, there was no question.
A lot of things went through my head. I felt bad that a young life had been snuffed out, I tried to figure possible legal penalties, I wondered how his parents were going to react, if they’d start screaming when they found him. But thrown across all of this was the overwhelming relief that I had not been driving.
I looked at Rex. And I felt bad for him. He was gray and all the blood or life or whatever it was seemed to have withdrawn itself from him. He stood there, head bent, looking down at the boy, arms forgotten at his sides, sucked empty by the world. I thought he might vomit and howl, but he just stood. And then he sighed and his breath caught like he was going to cry. But he didn’t. Instead, he turned and walked back to the car and we drove away.
No one came out onto the street. No one had seen us. And somehow both of us knew that nothing would come of this. That we’d skate. Rex didn’t drive fast, didn’t drive like we had to get away, and we rolled out of the neighborhood, not to accusing shrieks and wails of grief, but to the sound of his German engine and the rustle of wind in dry gum leaves.
We didn’t speak, and we didn’t turn around and go home. We went on to the connection.
Chapter Eighteen
I started the day puking. Rex and I had stayed up half the night shooting smack. When the drugs took hold he’d opened up about the acciden
t. He said he was never going to recover from it. I tried to offer some sort of comfort, but what can you do? It was his bag of misery and he was the only one who could carry it. The amount of difference you can make to another human being in a situation like that is really pretty limited. After a while I’d passed out. He’d left sometime after that. And now I’d woken up with a dope hangover that had turned every cell in my body against itself.
I crawled across the floorboards to the bathroom and heaved into the toilet until all I had left was black bile that stuck to the side of the bowl. It was midday before I could get off my knees. I found a blister of DF 118s and managed to get a handful down. It took a long time for the painkillers to kick in. I spent it waiting next to the toilet. A couple of hours later I woke up with tile impressions across my cheek and shoulder and although I didn’t really feel it, there must have been some improvement because I was able to lurch to the kitchen and make coffee.
I was standing with a mug by an open window, breathing slowly and fighting my stomach, when Bella phoned. She wanted me to meet her that night for a media bash downtown and she wanted me to wear a suit. The good news was that she was going to messenger over the necessary bucks. The bad news was that I would have to brave the outside world almost immediately to go get it.
Rodeo Drive. I took a cab. I could have gone somewhere cheaper, but Bella had sent a lot of money and it seemed stupid not to use as much of it as I could. I carried a plastic shopping bag with me for emergencies.
I’d never bought a suit before, but Versace was mentioned in all the mags, so I found the place and went inside. Lots of empty floor space, most of it marble, a few pieces of arty furniture, and a collection of very beautiful assistants. Straight, I’d never have had the guts to go in there. As it was, the horror of my hangover and the pills I’d taken insulated me from the worst of my inferiority.
A redheaded girl in leather pants that separated her labia picked out several sets of clothes for me to try on and escorted me to a changing room the same size as my apartment. Every time I glanced at her I caught these looks like she was really trying hard to be as nice to me as she would to anyone who didn’t look as though they’d just eaten a plate of dog shit. It was an effort for her but I appreciated it. It was way better than outright disdain.
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