The Big Click: November 2014 (Issue 17)

by The Big Click

  “You can buy me drinks until seven,” Mary Grace said. “Then I work. I make two hundred an hour.”

  “Two hundred?” I said.

  “Plus the room,” she said. “I know a place up the street.”

  I drank. I hadn’t seen that coming. “We finish these,” I said, “you can start work early. I just need to hit an ATM.”

  Mary Grace nodded. “Good,” she said.

  I waited impatiently while the bartender mixed her margarita. Two hundred dollars wasn’t much of an investment, but it wasn’t an investment at all unless I saw her again. I had to have that as a possibility.

  Mary Grace probably needed a drink before sex with me, but she drank slowly. I couldn’t. She was only half done when I finished, so I ordered another beer. Nervous about a moment I knew I’d enjoy.

  Mary Grace finished her margarita and I finished my second beer. I left a tip on the bar and we walked out, side by side but not touching.

  “There’s an ATM this way.” I pointed and my arm bumped hers. I took a step away from Mary Grace and straightened, my body tightening. I’d never been with a hooker before, or with a woman two decades my junior. Never with a woman this pretty.

  We made it to the ATM. She stood back as I stepped forward. I exhaled deeply, relieved. I needed her away from me. I was not used to being with someone who wanted me for my money. I didn’t have a lot of money. I had a job that paid my rent, and a lifestyle that allowed me to save a little, but one expensive indulgence meant the forfeiture of many small pleasures.

  I withdrew three hundred. She could rip me off for the other hundred if she wanted, or maybe it would pay for something extra. I was too old to need something extra, unless it was a movie afterward, something like that.

  I pocketed my wallet, waited until my receipt printed, wadded it up and dropped it on the sidewalk. A man of the streets. I turned and looked at her, too late to see if she was pleased or appalled by my idiocy. She walked alongside me, looked over and smiled, but that could just be business.

  “It’s this way,” Mary Grace said.

  She turned and I turned with her, didn’t know what to say. I’d been glib when I thought I had no chance. Now I knew I’d be fucking her soon but it wasn’t for the right reason. I should have been glad, but I’ve never enjoyed partial victories.

  It didn’t take long to figure out where we were turning. A small wooden sign hung along the side of a brick building, in easy view for those on the sidewalk, three lines:

  HOTEL

  HOURLY

  RATES

  The “hotel” had a wooden door and it was shut. I turned the knob. It was locked.

  “You gotta knock,” Mary Grace said, stepped forward and rapped hard on the door three times. We stood there a minute. I wondered if the place had lost its lease.

  The door opened. A man a little taller than me, in a shabby dark suit that looked about my size, opened the door and stepped back as we stepped in. His long, straight hair died at his shoulders. “You guests?” he said in a reedy voice. God, I thought, you should be a singer.

  Mary Grace said, “Yes.”

  The shabby man stood on the opposite side of a counter. “You staying more than an hour?”

  Mary Grace shook her head.

  “Thirty,” he said.

  I laid two twenties on the counter. I didn’t want to touch the shabby man.

  “You don’t got exact?” he said. “We kind of need exact.”

  “Then you should charge twenty,” I said, and took back a bill.

  Shabby opened a drawer under his side of the counter. “Put it back, I got a ten.”

  “Let’s see it,” I said.

  He put his ten gently on the counter, smoothed it with the flat of his hand. Whatever diseases he had would be all over that money. I dropped my twenty and picked up the ten, stuck it in my wallet fast as I could.

  Shabby reached behind him, grabbed a key on a ring off a hook on the wall. He held it out. “Twenty-two,” he said. “Second floor.”

  “Put it on the counter,” I said. I wasn’t here to touch him.

  He grinned with an open mouth. There was a gap where one of his teeth was missing. The rest were dark yellow. “Don’t you like me, mister?”

  “Drop the key,” I said, “or gimme my fucking money back.”

  The grin held. He dropped the key. Mary Grace looked at me, eyes wide.

  I grabbed the key in one hand, took Mary Grace’s in the other. She pulled away but I held tight. She walked away from the counter first.

  “It’s up the—” Shabby started but we were already on the stairs and away from him.

  We got to the second floor. Twenty-two was the first room on the left. I unlocked the door, pushed it open and Mary Grace walked in.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  That mattered to me. I had a whore who at least knew how to fake manners. I shut the door behind us and looked down. The carpet was black and it looked stained anyway. I locked the door’s one lock and bolted its one bolt, turned around. The room was tiny, stains everywhere. There was no furniture except a bed and we were practically in it. “I wanted to pick you up,” I said.

  “You did,” Mary Grace said.

  “You weren’t supposed to be a hooker.”

  She bent her arms at the elbows, palms up. “We’re here.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s what we are.”

  She must have caught something in my voice, she backed up. One leg hit the foot of the bed and she sat.

  “Where you belong,” I said.

  Her eyes widened.

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “I don’t hate whores, I love them. I’ve just never been with one.”

  Mary Grace took the purse off her shoulder and set it next to her on the stained sheet. She raised her arms, pulled her shirt up over her head, flung it behind her. Her nipples pointed at me. “I’ll take the money now,” she said.

  I stood a foot from her. “Yeah, sure.” I got two hundred from my wallet, handed it to her. I put the wallet back in my pocket and she put the money in her purse. I stared down at her breasts. A beautiful woman was going to fuck me for money, and part of me was grateful. Part of me resented my gratitude. I didn’t mind paying for sex. That’s what dating was, that’s what marriage was. I’d had my share of both; payment was no big deal. But she was taking advantage of my weakness, and she expected me to appreciate it.

  I looked up from her bare breasts and smacked her open-handed across one cheek. Her eyes went wide and her hands reached back, braced her from falling. “What?” she said. “Motherfuck—” I grabbed her throat and pressed her back against the bed.

  I lay fully dressed on top of her shirtless. Her lips pursed. I kissed her that way, pulled back fast before she could bite, pressed one hand hard into her chest and held her down, though her arms were free to move. With the other hand I stroked one of her breasts, let my fingers trail down to her belly. I felt myself getting hard, pulled up off her enough to get comfortable, brought my hand back up to her breast and smiled. Slowly, I lowered my mouth to her nipple.

  Something slammed against the side of my head. I tilted my neck to see what it was, saw nothing and fell to the floor. I pushed myself up onto my elbows and saw her already on her feet, stepping away from me. Her shirt and purse were in one hand. The other hand held a small pistol by the barrel. Hair and blood stuck to the butt of the pistol. She turned the gun so its barrel pointed at my chest.

  “Throw your wallet to the door,” she said. “Sit on the bed.”

  I rolled onto my side and got out my wallet, flipped it forward. Good thing it only had to go a few feet. I touched the side of my head where it ached. Wet.

  The whore knelt down, set her purse on the floor and dropped my wallet into it. She pulled her shirt down over her head and kept the pistol pointed at me, but she didn’t need to. I could barely sit up. She slipped one arm through a sleeve, switched the pistol to that hand and slid the other through. If I wasn�
��t so damned dizzy I’d have leapt off the bed at her, but she seemed to sway from one spot to another.

  She grabbed the doorknob.

  “I thought,” I said, and pushed myself to the edge of the bed, “you might like it rough.”

  She looked back at me. Her eyes showed nothing. She looked at the door again, turned the knob.

  I got to my feet somehow, tottered forward, fell at her as she pulled the door back.

  My hands grabbed her hips and my weight pushed her forward. Her head turned sideways and hit the edge of the opening door. Blood trickled from the top of her forehead.

  “I hoped you’d want to see me again,” I said, and fell to my knees.

  She turned my way. Blood on her face, she pointed the pistol at the top of my head.

  My eyes blurred. All I could see was her beauty.

  “I can take you away from this,” I said.

  She kept the pistol on me, opened the door wide. She was going to leave me. I had to see her again.

  “I know where to find you,” I said. “I will find you.”

  The door shut. She remained in the room. Blood fell past her nose to her lips. She licked it away.

  I saw her tongue. She straightened her arm and I saw a flash. Pain was everywhere as I crumpled and held her, crumpled and watched her open the door and walk out. I fell and she went away, but I fell with her. She was gone, and now I fucked her. And she fucked me too. Man, did she fuck me. We made love so sweet I would never rise again.

  © 2014 Rob Pierce.

  About Rob Pierce

  Rob Pierce is the author of the forthcoming novel Uncle Dust (All Due Respect Books), and the editor of Swill Magazine. He has been nominated for a Derringer Award for short crime fiction, and has had his stories published in Flash Fiction Offensive, Pulp Modern, Plots With Guns, Revolt Daily, Near To The Knuckle, and Shotgun Honey, among others. He is married and the father of two, although he won’t say which two.

  Bad Day at Black Bloc

  by Nick Mamatas

  For some people, riots are a place for settling scores. Nominally, we were all committed to non-violence in our protest against the wars and the bailouts, pollution, and the police state. Property destruction is something else all together, but try telling the cops that. We hit suddenly, without warning, without social media, but somehow the OPD knew. They came dressed to party that night, with extra-long riot batons, flash grenades firing off at eye-level, and even an LRAD wailing off in the distance—the liberals cowered before it, hands over their ears, knees to the pavement. The sweet sound of a brand-new art-deco wine bar window shattering helped drown out the car-alarm yowling and all the other chaos, but distracted me too. And at six-foot-two, and the only woman—sexism!—I was supposed to be the lookout for my affinity group. I didn’t see the phalanx of pigs spilling out from around the corner till they had almost outflanked us and pushed over our bicycle barrier, and there was nothing else to do but take our beatings and hope someone’s cell phone was streaming it to the Internet.

  Or run. “Run!” Robin shouted, and he started running. No time for consensus, we all took off after him just to keep from being separated, then ran right into another line of police. Two cops jumped right on Robin, working over his joints, and the other boys got smacked down hard trying to extract him. They were everywhere, the pigs, their batons raised high like a very sudden forest of saplings. I felt a slight touch to the back of my head. Then another, just a bit more insistent, almost like a tap on the shoulder. I turned around to see a cop, a woman cop, almost a foot shorter than me, two hands wrapped around her baton. Her eyes were wide like a pair of white eggs.

  “Fake it!” she said, her teeth clenched. Then she swung her baton again, and pulled the blow so it was barely a tap. I stumbled forward and dropped to my knees. I’d been political for a couple of years, but had never really gotten involved in black bloc tactics till recently. Who was this cop? She was a young one, and Latina with dark eyes and a badge reading l. perez. I did my best to simultaneously play dead, keep my eye on L. Perez, and keep from getting stomped, which was tough as another surge of protestors had set the cops to mad dancing. A few pepper bombs got popped a block away or so and I could feel my nose tingling even from my spot on the street. Perez whirled through the protest, cleaving a path with her baton. She was definitely off script, running from the police line and then back. A big trash container went up in flames and some of our people turned it over to spill the burning garbage into the streets, and a cop car—empty and left unguarded purposefully for cop propaganda purposes—was turned over. It took me a few minutes to realize… Perez was only taking it easy on women. Dudes, she fustigated. In the ribs when she couldn’t reach their heads with a solid swing. A couple in the face. The few girls she encountered, a fairy wand tap and then down they went, as convincing as any third-grader playing Abraham Lincoln in the school play might be.

  I crawled over to the edge of the curb to get a better look at her and was nearly trampled by two crusty punks running from the pigs. That’s when I saw it—someone tall and gangly in a black bloc outfit, face obscured by one of those tedious Guy Fawkes masks, jumped over my body and rushed up to the crusties, jabbed one of them with something, then ran. The crusty stood in place for a long moment, watching his filthy shirt turn black with blood. He was a skinny kid, and tall himself, so it only took a few seconds. He kept walking, staring at himself, oblivious to the riot churning around him, to the sweeping spotlights of the helicopters. Almost everyone was in some variation of black, and the pigs wore navy blue, so the stabber vanished instantly into the crowd. The kid took to a knee and his comrade, spooked, ran.

  “Medic! Street medic!” I called out, getting back to my feet. Perez was long gone. The next time a cop came at me with a club, he or she would mean it. The kid looked up at me, or past me, at police reconstituting their lines to have another go at us with their projectile weapons. For a second he looked eager, then resigned. I called for a street medic again, but it was like shouting into a tsunami.

  “You’d better go,” the kid said to me, his voice high and cracked. He was right. Neither of us were going to ask the pigs for help, and none of them would give it even if we did. If the kid died at my feet, the murder would be pinned on me. I pulled off my balaclava and shook my head till my hair fixed itself, turned my hoodie inside out so that the baby blue lining showed, and threaded my way through the crowds, to my apartment. My cell phone blooped all night—texted demands to meet at the police station to do some solidarity for the arrested, worried calls from my mother, and a couple of affinity group guys who’d not been nabbed, but I just smoked cigarettes and followed the #Oakland hashtag on Twitter till dawn.

  The kid’s name was Conner Kiernan. Someone had managed to get him to a hospital, where he lived most of the night, conscious and in sufficient pain to ask to speak to his father before he died. Conner was in all the papers come morning. The cops and the mayor spun it like so: wild anarchists not only trash downtown—again—but go on mad stabbing sprees for obscure initiatory reasons. We turned on our own, like desperate cannibals. “Worse than gangs,” Mayor Yoshida said. “At least gangs have an economic purpose; they fight over territory, or drug money. These people just live to create chaos, and they die to create chaos as well.” The wound hadn’t that bad; if not for the riot, Conner would have made it to the ER, and the doctors would have saved him, if not his spleen. If not for the riot, Conner wouldn’t have been stabbed.

  Robin was livid. “This is a total escalation. What’s next, live ammunition?” He’d asked me that five times before coffee. He was bent over his laptop, going through videos on YouTube and on other, more secure websites, looking for footage of the stabbing that one or more of the streamers might have captured. Like most of our side, he was sure that Conner Kiernan was the target of a cop assassin. I didn’t say anything about what I’d seen.

  Instead: “Why him?” That’s what I said, mostly to myself.

  Robin gla
nced over at me, then announced, dramatically, “Time for me to get goin’ to ye ol’ dayjob!” That was the signal. He closed his laptop, then pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and took out the battery. I was stretched across the couch, my legs hanging off the far end, ashtray on my belly because I liked to live dangerously, so it took me a minute to find my own phone and pull out my battery. Now we could talk. Robin was very security conscious. In a wireless world, we were all always swimming in electromagnetic fields we couldn’t even perceive. Robin liked to remind me of that.

  “Maggie,” he said. “I’m going to speak for approximately two minutes. Please don’t diminish me by rolling your eyes or interrupting me. I think it’s MKUltra. I’m going to assume you don’t know what that is, so I apologize in advance if you do. CIA mind-control experiments. Chemical, biological, and even radiological means to brainwash people; they experimented on Americans and even some Canadians back in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The Bay Area was a major locus of the experiments. It’s back, and I think last night was a field test. The ruling class won’t have to worry about the rabble if they could keep us at one another’s throats literally, and not just socially via racism, sexism, homophobia, cissexism and—”

  “National chauvinism,” I finished. He frowned at my interruption, but too much complaining about it would be patriarchal, so Robin said nothing. I considered his idea, let my cigarette burn down another centimeter. “That explains why a stabbing. It doesn’t explain why that kid. Why Conner Kiernan. Why him?”

  “Why not him?” Robin said. “Maybe he wasn’t even targeted specifically. The command could have been ‘Kill the next person you see wearing white-boy dreds.’ Or even ‘Kill the fifth.’”

  “Yeah, but now you’re just explaining everything in a way that allows us to predict nothing. A theory has to have predictive power, not just explanatory power.”

  “Huh?”

  “I took a course on the history of scientific thought last semester,” I said. “I’ll lend you the book we had to read. Anyway, sure, the CIA brainwashed Guy Fawkes Number 4397 to kill someone at random, and it worked. But doesn’t that explain everything? Why did the cops start lobbing tear gas at 11PM and not 11:30? The CIA! Why did the liberals decide to hold a candlelight vigil last night instead of just staying home and signing an online petition? The CIA! Why did we all set eyes on the Disney Store and decide to liberate the cowgirl from Toy Story last night, all at once? Wasn’t that spooky? As in spooks.”