Detective Doyle cast his eyes ceilingward. He looked charming. Not menacing at all. Beth’s pulse thumped in her throat while she waited. “I guess I can’t.” Reluctantly he handed her phone back.
Then he smiled again, terrifyingly likeable. “Please forgive me, Ms. Asucar. This case is going nowhere fast, and there’s a chance Mrs. Saunders has been harmed, maybe murdered. Your friend Saunders-slash-Shanley is implicated. A lot of blood in Mrs. Saunders’ group was found in his apartment. I admit the rude red-head you mention may have had something to do with bringing you to our attention. Well, can you blame her? You’re a very attractive young lady,” he said, twinkling at her as if he were her father.
How dare you? Beth bridled indignantly.
He put both palms up with her phony calling card between his finger and thumb. “Now, don’t take offense. I’m just saying that she may have been jealous of you. Maybe she’s confused. You do have the same first name as the missing woman,” he reminded her.
Beth’s tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. She stuffed her phone back into her purse.
“B-blood?” she said, for something to say.
“The DNA test is only ninety percent complete, but it’s looking like a match,” he said. “These tests take forever. Not like on TV,” he grumbled.
“So he—he killed her?” This was the revenge Jee had suggested—to frame Blake for killing his ex-wife. Suddenly it seemed a lot more appealing. Blake had dumped her for a teenager, he’d cheated on her, he’d cheated her and her children of income for years, he’d led a double life, he’d left her penniless and homeless, he’d accused her of murdering herself, and now it looked as though he might be punished for murdering her.
Her face fell and her stomach plunged. No. That wasn’t right. Even her doughy weasel of a husband didn’t deserve that. “He couldn’t have.”
“It was either him or the daughter. The son’s out in Colorado, but the daughter is right here in town,” Detective Doyle said, freezing Beth to solid ice where she sat. “The mother isn’t living with her. So where is she? The daughter is a beneficiary in the missing woman’s insurance, same as the ex-husband,” he added, as if noticing Beth’s look of horror.
“She wouldn’t,” Beth said fiercely. She had to get out of here before she said something stupider. She had to stay and pump him for everything, so she could protect Darleen.
“You’d be surprised what daughters will do for money.”
“That’s horrible,” she whispered. Darleen. She had to warn her, protect her. And also kick her black and blue for giving Blake my number—that’s how this happened. Darleen must have told Blake she’d been talking to Beth, and from Blake to Farrah was no distant step.
“Will you be seeing more of Mr. Saunders-slash-Shanley?” Detective Doyle said now.
“I thought I was meeting him here,” she confessed. “He texted me. Which you must know, since you met me here,” she realized, turning angry eyes on him. “What is this?”
She realized how stupid she sounded. Good, let him think she was stupid. She felt stupid. No more calls to Darleen. A void opened in her belly as she thought this. Was she being cut off from her children now?
You fool, she thought, Delilah warned you about this. You won’t be recognizable to them. They won’t know you. You’re going to lose them all.
With a swooping, sick feeling, she realized that she had already lost them, long before she turned into a sex demon, broke into Blake’s secret apartment, and left blood and naked pictures behind.
She noticed that Detective Doyle had not mentioned seeing her in the naked pictures. Delayed panic filled her, even as it occurred to her that Pog had spoken the truth when she assured her and Jee that she had aimed the camera away from their masked faces.
Not that Detective Doyle could have any illusions about who was in those pictures. Her fake business card named an apartment three floors upstairs from Blake’s in the Doral.
Beth drew a deep breath, closed her eyes, and opened them.
“May I leave?” she said. “I’ve been a fool, and no, I won’t be seeing Blake any more. But I haven’t killed anyone, Detective.” Yet. She turned hopeful eyes on him.
And glory be, he smiled faintly at her. She wondered if he knew he was doing it. “Sure.” He patted her on the hand. “Let’s keep it that way, huh?”
Something deep in her body hummed at his touch. She shied like a bunny. “Thank you. I won’t.” She bolted. At the gallery door she looked back.
He was still smiling, but not at her face.
He’d been checking out her ass!
Beth turned and fled, clattering down the stone stairs in her expensive shoes, feeling absurdly gratified.
Pog
I didn’t rip Beth a fresh one when she reported on her field trip. She knew what she’d done. I think. She was more freaked out about having an orgasm when the cop touched her elbow than she was about maybe getting indicted for murdering herself.
She did the drama all over the kitchen while I bullied Jee into helping me make up a grocery list and Amanda played Super Mario. Reg was in Jee’s room, organizing her underwear drawer. He’d been quiet for hours. Jee was definitely the Jerk Whisperer.
“Focus, Beth. You could get arrested,” I said.
“Oh, that’s not happening,” she said and flapped a hand. “I found out how you can do this job, though. If touching men feels this good, no wonder you don’t mind having sex for money!”
“Goody,” Amanda said, not looking away from her video game.
“Are you calling us whores?” Jee said dangerously.
“We are whores,” I cut in before that could escalate. “I should know. I was one for eight years before I signed. Between what we do now and what I did then, the difference is hair-thin.”
“This,” Jee said, squaring off to me, “is going to be a problem. If you really believe that.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s not about belief. It’s about the work, the actual mechanics, the fact that we fuck and we get paid. How is that different?”
Jee lost her temper. “It is! It’s different because we’re in charge! The Regional Office is a joke and we all know it! We took—” She gulped. “I took this job to get some power. I was a sex slave my whole childhood. I was broken and used up by the time I was recruited by the Regional Office. Big surprise, huh?” she jeered, when Beth goggled. “That work breaks women. It kills them. It kills their souls. Well, I’ve still got mine. My life was taken by evil men who sold me over and over. And now I get my life back. I feel alive again. That’s not prostitution, Pog,” she said, drilling me with a glare and turning aside.
I blinked. “I guess my years weren’t as bad as your years. Which is totally understandable,” I added, putting my palms in the air. How had we gotten into this conversation? Our lifestyle was based on ignoring this conversation. One of the perks was not having to have this conversation, ever.
Beth edged toward me and away from Jee. “Why did you sign, if you were already doing the work?” she asked me.
Wasn’t gonna tell her that. I shrugged. “I needed dental.”
Beth blinked. She sent Jee a scared glance. “I didn’t mean to belittle your suffering. Not at all. I’m sorry. I’m really confused.”
“It wasn’t you,” Jee snarled, hunching her shoulder in my direction.
And that was why we were having the conversation. And just one reason why Ish didn’t want to be here supervising us in the field, and why instead he’d sent the moron Reg to stand in.
This conversation was inevitable with every rookie.
I could see Jee would hold this against me forever. I could understand why. I hadn’t a clue how to fix it.
Amanda saved me. “It’s normal for Beth to be confused. She has a right to ask questions.” Jee sent a snarl at her. Amanda didn’t turn a hair. “Unless we want to bail on this gig, we have to work out how to break in the new kids. That entails a certain amount of self-exposure.”
> “It’s because we’re women,” Jee growled with loathing. “Men don’t have to talk everything to death.”
“Male teams talk shit out,” Amanda told her levelly.
“Ugh,” I said. Talking shit out sounded pretty yucky to me.
“My turn,” Amanda said. She turned to Beth. “I’m an Army brat. We learn to work with anybody. The way I see it, you give up a certain amount of autonomy in any job. If you’re lucky, you get to pick the job and therefore you have some choice in what part of your life you surrender to it. I’m an athlete. I do all kinds of stuff with my body. I’m kind of obsessed with it. I love it. It’s fun. So that part of this job is actually okay.” She shrugged. “Doesn’t mean it’s not still a job. Some days I’m bored, some days I don’t do it so well, some days it can be a bit unpleasant.”
“So morality doesn’t enter into it at all for you?” Beth said, looking fascinated.
“I like my privacy. That part bothers me sometimes. Most men don’t want to get close. They just want to do stuff with their bodies, same as me. But there’s still the potential for occasional intimacy.” Amanda made a faint yuck face.
There it was. Amanda’s weak spot. Don’t get too close. It might take forty years to get Amanda’s backstory. It might take forever.
She looked at Jee pointedly.
Jee seemed to be calming down, halle-fucking-luia. She drew a short breath, held it, and let it out. “I guess it all starts with the wave. The tidal wave,” she clarified. “My family lived right on the beach in the proverbial shanty-box. When the wave hit, it destroyed them all, and everything we had, and everyone we knew. Why I didn’t die I’ll never know. Then the vultures came and picked over what was left, including me.”
By this I took her to mean human vultures. Real vultures don’t make a child turn tricks.
“It wasn’t a gentle life before the wave, but it was death afterward, even if I didn’t totally die. I survived it, even tolerated it until I turned thirteen. Then I began to get angry. I think watching all those seventies American sitcoms raised expectations. I found out how different life is for people in other places. That made me angry.” She made a face. “I would have been killed for that. Not might have. Would have. They were gonna send me to the snuff films. Then I got recruited. I had a chance at an unbroken body, a chance to feel something besides round-the-clock fear or pain. Sure, it sucks losing everything. But people don’t have to be so shitty to each other. They don’t have to make children into whores.” She sent me another hostile look.
There was nothing I could say.
And then Beth showed me what to say. “No, they don’t. That was horrible, what they did.” She took a few careful steps toward Jee. Her hands twisted together. “I can see why you’re angry. It’s something I really notice about you.” She cupped Jee’s hands in hers, a thing I wouldn’t have tried without body armor. “Because I’m angry, too. It overpowers me. Anger almost drove me to kill myself. I’m hoping I can learn from you about dealing with it.”
Jee sniffed and tossed her hair over her shoulder with a jerk of her chin. “First thing, Beth, you have to love your anger.”
“Love it.” Beth blinked.
Jee pulled her hands free. “Anger won’t kill you. Stifling your anger will. Anger’s going to keep you alive until you find something else to live for.” As if she heard herself, Jee stopped. She threw me a defiant look. “Your turn.”
I was stuck. Maybe if I framed this the way Jee did, as advice to Beth, I could get through it without humiliating myself.
“Jee’s right. It’s probably healthier to face the anger and turn it out there, aim it at the people who earn a spanking. I guess I just accepted my, what, my place.” I swallowed. “I did resent being looked down on. I really did,” I said, meeting Jee’s eyes, like, Please get over it, because we have to work together for the forseeable century. You’re my best friend.
I said, “I’ve found compensations as a succubus. It’s great to stay young while the kind of snooty bitches who once called me a big piece of garbage start to sag and wrinkle. They start hitting the gym more and more often. They turn to plastic surgery and stomach staples and botox. I don’t. And I always look good.”
Beth made a sound in her throat. Glancing at her face, I couldn’t tell if she realized she’d done it.
I was warming up now. “It tickles the shit out of me to swank into a restaurant that would never have let me in when I was a whore, unless I had a man on my arm. Times have changed. The world’s on my side now. Plus, there’s succubus power. Persuasiveness,” I explained to Beth. “It’s like having a sex-taser in your fingertips. You’ll find out what that’s like, when you need it.”
I waited. Beth waited. Everybody else waited. God, I hated talking about myself.
“And then I order food those bitches can’t eat, platters of it, and I eat it all right in front of them, and I drink like a sailor and I belch like one, and the waiter kisses my fucking ass, because I’m hot, and because I tip him sixty percent. That kills the haters who are watching, believe me.” I smiled. “Anybody disrespects me, man or woman, I turn it around on them. Any woman calls me a piece of garbage, I take her man. I just waltz right back to the restroom with him on my arm, fuck him in the stall, and bring him back to her all red and flustered with his fly unzipped. Any man disrespects me, I can make him come in his pants with a look and then walk away, leaving him feeling like shit. And I enjoy it. And I get paid to do it. So who’s using who?”
I stopped, hearing my rage. I swallowed. I don’t do rage. I do the good life. I said to Jee, “Anger takes up so much time. Living well is the best revenge.”
“Is that why you call yourself Pog?” Beth said incredulously. “They called you a piece of garbage? P.O.G. Pog?”
“Actually,” I said, breathing deeply to cool my head and throat, tossing off the big one like an afterthought, “it stands for ‘person of girth.’ I was not just a whore. I was a fat whore.”
Nobody said anything.
I looked at Beth. Time to get the eyes off me. “We all feel like we’re just not right somehow. The most beautiful woman in the world obsesses about her weight, her age, her skin, the shape of her nose, the way her hair grows, yadda fucking blah. This life is a way of getting rid of all that. If we want to dress up, we do it for ourselves. Unless, of course, we’re looking for a dick to fuck.”
I faced Jee. “The difference between you and me? You still feel bad for having been a whore. It was a horrible experience. You never had any choices. It was evil and it sucked. The worst thing was, you felt bad—as if it was your fault—because that’s part of what they always do to you when they make you become a whore. Me? I own ‘whore.’ I define it my way. I take its power. And I kick anybody’s ass if they disrespect me for it.”
There was a long, electric silence.
“Whore is just a word,” Amanda said. “A mean word.”
I held my breath. Jee seemed to be thinking. Good. Finally she nodded and turned away. I hid my deep, deep relief by folding the grocery list.
I wasn’t crazy about the look on Beth’s face. She was thinking again. That couldn’t be good.
“Your turn, Beth,” Amanda said. “Why’d you sign on, and what do you think you’re going to get out of this job?”
Beth gulped. “Well,” she quavered, with a glance at Jee, “I really did think it was going to be a form of, well, selling myself. The way the recruiter explained it—it was more like what you’ve described, Pog. But I was angry, too. I still am,” she said, sounding stronger.
She looked straight at Jee. “I was brought up never to be angry. Blake and the divorce made me so angry, I thought I was going to die of it. This job—and you especially, Jee—you’ve given me permission to be angry. I can’t thank you enough for that. Thank you. I let Blake run me over on the divorce settlement. He just rolled right over me. I was so much in shock, I let him, because I was being a good girl,” she spat.
Give her credit,
Jee took this confession well. Darker color was creeping up her neck toward her ears. I bet those thank yous really got to her.
Beth said, “Then it turns out my kids think I’d gotten a fine deal out of it. I tell them their father stiffed me on the settlement, but he tells them he didn’t, and they believe him. They won’t take me in, even for a few weeks. I was homeless. So much for being a good girl. That is the first time in my adult life, I think, that I’ve allowed myself to feel really angry. And once I started, I couldn’t stop. Between rage and trying not to feel rage, I was completely wrecked.” She snorted. “Then D—the recruiter came along with the offer. She said I could mess with men’s heads. That was the first moment when I realized how much I’d lost.”
“Beth,” I said as gently as I could, “are you sure you really want this job? Seems to me like the good girl is still in there.”
“Of course she’s still in there,” Jee snapped. “She’s spent a lifetime being the good girl. She made permanent commitments.”
Beth opened her eyes at that. “And you three haven’t made a permanent commitment?”
“Not like yours,” I said. “You gave up your youth for this domestic princess dream thing. Once a woman gets past ‘young,’ she becomes invisible to a huge percentage of the population. She can’t get work, she can’t get decent medical care, she can’t even get a job.” I heard the bitterness in my voice again. Whoa. I’d thought the good life had pretty much settled that stuff down for me. “There’s only a certain amount of time a woman can say to herself, ‘I have my whole life ahead of me, I can be anyone I want to be, I can make all my dreams come true.’ Men get lots more time than we do.”
Amanda crushed her beer can in her hand. “Bull. Compared with what we four have here? Even men get a crappy deal. By forty-five they feel like they ought to be there by now. Wherever ‘there’ was supposed to be. By sixty they know that this is it. Best it’ll ever be.”
“And that’s the privileged ones,” Jee said. “My father was an old man at thirty. He had no future. What would he achieve? A second cardboard box for us to live in?”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 15
