DOUBLE-D DOUBLE CROSS

A Butch Fatale Caper

by

CHRISTA FAUST

©2012 Christa Faust

www.ChristaFaust.com

Original cover art © Jed Dougherty 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

1.

When the tattooed tomato walked into my shabby EchoPark office, I had no idea if she was gonna kiss me or slap me. I was hoping for the former, but betting on the latter.

Her name was Diversity. Back when we first met, she’d been this waifish hippie chick fresh out of UC Berkley. A second-generation granola dyke whose homespun, organic hemp exterior hid a multi-O dynamo that wouldn’t quit. We had three tempestuous months together before it ended badly. Can’t say I was surprised. She was the type who got all juicy over the idea of slumming with a rough and tumble blue-collar butch like me, but couldn’t stop lecturing me about how I was internalizing patriarchal oppression because I cut my hair like Tony Curtis.

In the years since we’d parted ways, I hadn’t changed all that much. I’ve been 5’10” since I was fifteen and walk around at a fit 150. Muscular arms, broad shoulders and big, solid tits that I gave up hiding years ago. Never been pretty, but I’ve grown into handsome pretty well. Still cutting my hair like Tony Curtis.

Diversity, on the other hand, was something else. She’d gone from womyn-with-a-Y to all woman and then some. She had put on twenty curvy pounds. The kind of curves that don’t come from tofu and lentils. There was candy apple gloss on her wide, expressive mouth and a labret piercing through her lower lip. Her once waist-length dirty-blond hair had been chopped into a bob, bleached Jean Harlow platinum and coiffed into retro curls, anchored behind her left ear with a glittery black orchid. The lonely labrys tattoo on her right wrist had multiplied into two full sleeves of girly pin-ups and black cats, dice and snakes and flaming hearts.

She was delicately balanced on strappy wedge heels and squeezed into tiny, high-waisted denim shorts that covered the legal minimum of her sturdy, tattooed legs and ass. Her tissue-thin vintage blouse was tied in a knot just below her chubby cupcake tits. She’d obviously rethought her stance on the oppressive nature of traditional gender roles, but she hadn’t given up all the principles of her old-school feminist upbringing. She still didn’t wear a bra.

“Hello, Butch,” she said, slinking towards my cluttered desk with a calculated switch and sway that wasn’t doing my ailing air conditioner any favors.

“Diversity,” I replied, displaying my natural aptitude for witty repartee. “You look… um… wow.”

“It’s Diva now,” she said, fishing a glossy postcard out of her kiss-lock purse and setting it on my desk.

I looked down at the postcard. It advertised a burlesque show, staring Miss Diva Derringer. There was Diversity, front and center, wearing a red cowboy hat and little else.

“I’m in town for a few weeks with my burlesque troupe,” she continued. “I thought maybe you might like to come see the show. I can put you on the guest list.” She looked up at me, trouble in her eyes. “You know, if you’re not busy.”

By that time, I had figured out that she probably wasn’t gonna slap me. I figured I’d see if she was interested in the other option.

“I’m not busy right now,” I said, holding her gaze as I stood up and came around to the front of the desk.

“No?” She arched a slender, delicately plucked eyebrow. “What about…?”

She gestured at my paperwork with a coy half-smile.

“It can wait,” I told her, snaking one arm around her narrow waist and using the other to sweep everything off the surface of the desk.

I kissed her, cupping her ample ass in both hands and lifting her up onto the desk. Her clunky shoes thumped to the carpet as she wrapped her legs around my waist and pulled me in closer, giving it back in spades. Her tattooed skin smelled like raw sugar and fresh girlsweat. No more patchouli. I never wanted to stop kissing her.

But eventually, I needed more. In breathless seconds I had her bent over my desk with those tiny shorts around her ankles. I knelt down behind her, hungry but wanting a moment to enjoy the scenery. In that moment, her ass was my whole world. Voluptuous, pear-shaped cheeks that begged to be slapped. The full pink lips peeking out between them begged for something else. I was happy to oblige.

I spread her wide and buried my face, tongue stretching to tease her fat clit from behind. She let out a gasp that swiftly melted into a happy purr as I slid my tongue slowly backwards, through her slick folds and over the salty, hairless skin that lead back to her musky asshole. I started working her clit in earnest with my middle finger, then slid my thumb into her pussy, homing in on her g-spot while circling her back door with my tongue. Listening to her body. Finding her rhythm. Letting muscle-memory guide me back in time. Even after all those years, I still remembered what she liked.

 Feeling her build up to that first orgasm was like watching a favorite scene in an old movie. First her strong, meaty thighs started to tense up, just like they used to. Then she went up on the balls of her bare feet while the hidden muscles inside her thickened and tightened around my thumb. She went from kittenish sighs to deep, throaty grunts and emphatic profanity. Then that rapid butterfly flutter traveled through her pussy like a miniature thunderstorm as the rest of her body went pliant and boneless against me.

I knew from experience that this was far from the end of the show. She was just getting warmed up. As for me, you better believe I was ready to go the distance.

In pulp novels, the private dick always keeps a gat in his desk drawer. I keep my iron in a gun safe keyed to my fingerprint, but I do keep an extra strap-on in my desk drawer. You know, for emergencies.

I pinked up her ass and thighs with a couple of healthy slaps, then dropped my jeans, got the rig strapped around my hips, and rolled a condom down the length of the silicone shaft.

You probably think that’s funny, don’t you, using a rubber on a dildo? But experience has taught me that unless you crack open a brand new package right in front of them, most women won’t let you use a sex-toy raw. They don’t know where it’s been. And let me tell you, mine have been around.

She looked over her shoulder at the dildo and then up at me with wide eyes and flushed cheeks.

“What?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you still think the dildo is a tool of the evil patriarchal oppressors?”

A cute little giggle bubbled out of her.

“Shut up and fuck me, Butch.”

Who was I to argue? I did what the lady asked.

I started slow, but she was having none of that. She bucked with her own demanding rhythm, daring me to keep up. Not about to be outdone, I sucked in a deep breath, gripped her plush, fleshy hips and went at her double time. She responded by jacking her clit like Eddie Van Halen ripping a guitar solo.

Sweat was everywhere. Running into my eyes and down between my tits, pooling in the hollow between Diva’s shoulder blades. Tiny droplets flew from her tangled hair. Her nipples were drawing crazy Spirograph circles of sweat on my desk with every thrust. The multi-O dynamo was working at optimum capacity.

But the friction of the harness strap against my clit was making me crazy, and I’d had just about enough of being chivalrous. She was ahead by three when I stopped counting. It was time for a little quid pro fucking quo.

I tore off the harness and tossed it aside, gripping a handful of platinum curls and guiding Diva’s head down to my aching cunt. She didn’t need instructions. She just spread the thick black hair with her thumbs and got to work.

She started off teasing with gentle sucking and nibbling, torturing me for several excruciating minutes before settling into the swift side-to-side rhythm I needed. She obviously remembered me, too.

I leaned back against the edge of the desk and let my legs fall open a little wider, losing myself in the building sensation.

That’s when somebody rang the downstairs buzzer.

Diva looked up at me with questioning eyes.

“My assistant’ll handle it,” I told her.

I was nearly there when I heard a sheepish knock on my office door.

“Butch?” It was Penny Park, my trusty Femme Friday.

“Goddamit,” I said. “I’m not in.”

“It’s work.” She lowered her voice, barely audible through the closed door. “Paying work.”

I swore between clenched teeth. I hadn’t seen a paycheck for so long, I’d forgotten what went on the left side of the decimal point.

“Five minutes, Penny.”

I lifted Diva off her knees and kissed my juices from her mouth.

“We’ll finish this later.”

She looked up at me with smoldering, mascara-smeared eyes.

“My email’s on the postcard,” she said. “Use it.“

We swiftly sorted through our inside-out clothing and got everything buttoned and zipped. After another lingering kiss, I hustled her out the back door with one last slap on the ass.

I picked up all the scattered papers and used them to cover up the sweat smears on my desk as best I could. I ran a comb through my hair, fixed my collar, then sat down behind my desk, trying to remember how to look professional.

“Send in the client, Penny.”

That’s when I noticed that I’d left the sticky, well-used strap-on in the middle of the floor.

2.

I threw myself into a home-base slide across the carpet, scooped up the incriminating dildo and was frantically stuffing it into a random file drawer when my potential paycheck walked into the room. If she noticed, she was too polite to say so.

The client was the kind of butch that makes me feel like Little Bo Peep. Not that she was bigger or stronger or tougher. Just colder. More guarded. Hard, but brittle, like she had way too much invested in maintaining that masculine armor. Like she had everything to lose.

She was short and wiry with a stoic Mestizo face under a #2 buzz cut. Concrete complexion and harsh crow’s feet. She was probably younger than me, but didn’t look it. Her dark eyes were narrow and wary.

She wore a white tank undershirt and sharply pressed Dickies work pants slung low on her prominent hip bones. Shaky blue hood ink on her sinewy arms. Calloused hands criss-crossed with healing burns. A cook’s hands. She wore too much Tres Flores aftershave and was flat as Nebraska, but the big, aggressive nipples poking through her sweat-damp beater were giving me ideas. Bad ideas, since she would probably slug me and call me a faggot. Me, I’ll eat anything. Anything with a pussy.

That cunnilingus interruptus had clearly left my motor in overdrive. I needed a cold shower. Or a hot woman. I didn’t see either option in my immediate future.

I wiped my sticky hand on the leg of my jeans before extending it to the client. Class, all the way.

“How ya doing?” I said. “Butch Fatale.”

She shook my hand with a stiff, challenging grip.

“Mickey Hernandez.”

It was all so damn manly, I almost giggled.

“Have a seat.” I sat back down behind my desk. “What can I do for you?”

I gestured to the good chair. The client chair. The only piece of furniture in the whole damn office that didn’t feature duct tape as a major structural component. She sat, then shifted. Obviously nervous. Or maybe the chair wasn’t so good after all.

“So you’re a lesbian, right?”

I snorted.

“Okay, okay.” She shrugged. “It’s just… well… you know how it is.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

She nodded. Shifted again. Looked down at her chewed fingernails. No eye contact. I knew there was no point in pushing somebody like her, so I just waited until she was ready to continue.

“I need you to find my girl. She disappeared.”

If she was coming to me and not the cops, I figured this was just another lovers’ quarrel. Half of the time the little runaway would show up on her own after a few hours of pouting. The other half, it turned out she had run away for a damn good reason.

But, hey, money’s money. As long as the missing girlfriend didn’t have a restraining order against Mickey, I was in no position to turn down paying work. I flipped my notebook to a blank page.

“How long has she been missing?”

“Five days.”

That raised an eyebrow.

“And nobody else has seen her during that time? Have you talked to her family? Friends?”

“Her parents don’t talk to her no more because… well you know.” She picked at the corner of a ragged nail. “They sure as hell ain’t gonna talk to me.”

“So then how do you know they haven’t seen her?”

More silence, then:

“A friend saw her yesterday.”

I frowned.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If someone saw her yesterday then she’s not really missing, is she? She’s just not with you. Besides, if you know where she is, then you don’t need me. Go to wherever she is and talk to her. If she wants to come home, she will. If not, there’s nothing I can do to help you anyway.”

 Another long, uncomfortable silence filled my stuffy office. My residual horniness was swiftly souring into hostility. I wanted to throttle Mickey and make her cough up whatever it was that she needed to say. I didn’t. I kept cool and waited.

“She has a drug problem,” Mickey finally said.

Even better.

“Hey, listen,” I replied. “I’m real sorry to hear that. But I’m a private investigator, not an interventionist. If you already know where she is…”

“You don’t understand,” Mickey said, dark eyes angry and defensive.

“Make me understand,” I replied, trying to keep my tone gentle and keep the frustration out of my voice.

“She only uses the crystal so she don’t feel bad about tricking.”

This was getting uglier by the minute, but it still didn’t sound like something I could do anything about.

“So she’s a prostitute?”

“She used to be,” she said. “Back before we got together. But she hated it. She would never go back unless there was something seriously wrong. When Chuy told me he saw her copping with one of the chicks she used to trick with, I knew…”

“Addicts have relapses,” I said.

“You think I don’t know about relapses?” She stood, restless, fists clenching. “We met in N.A. I got five years sober. I know all about fucking relapses.” She turned away, pacing. “Just like I know what’s going on right now is more than some relapse. She don’t need money. If she just wanted to get high, she has more than enough for a five-day binge in her fucking pocketbook. Longer, even. No, she’s in trouble. Serious trouble. I just know it.” She turned back to me and thumped her flat chest. “In my heart, I know it. You understand?”

She stalked over to the single dusty window, looking out without seeing.

“I can’t go to the place where Chuy saw her,” she said. “If I do… I just can’t.”

I got it. I nodded.

“Just find out where she’s staying. Find her and tell her…” She turned back to face me again, heartbreaking vulnerability seeping through the cracks in her tough-guy façade. “I just want her to come home. No questions asked. Okay?”

I looked away, knowing this was gonna get messy but not seeing any way to stay out of the mess. Mickey must have figured I was about to turn her down.

“I don’t know how much you charge,” she said. “But I’ll pay double. Three days, up front and you can keep it all even if you find her tonight.”

I could do a lot with that kind of money. You know, unheard-of luxuries like rent and bills and groceries. Maybe I’d even go hog wild and get new soles for my disintegrating shoes. Or buy some flowers for my long-suffering assistant.

“Mickey,” I said. “You just bought yourself a dick.”

Mickey allowed herself the smallest of smiles, then pulled out a fat roll of hundreds and started peeling them off one at a time.

“Tell me when.”

I was gonna stop her at twelve, but made myself wait until fourteen, feeling giddy. She nodded, then pulled a snapshot out of her wallet and laid it on top of the money.

“Her name’s Angie,” Mickey said. “Angela Marina Bedrosyan.”

I picked up the picture and forgot about everything else for a minute.

There was no getting around it. The first thing you noticed was tits. I’m not talking porn-star silicone either, I’m talking the kind of overflowing, all-natural double-D beauties that could make Russ Meyer rise from the grave. It took me a second to switch gears from leering cartoon wolf to serious professional and actually take in the rest of the photo. Okay, maybe more like thirty seconds. A minute, max.

The woman behind that astounding prow was hardly a supermodel, but it didn’t matter. You could see in her dark eyes that she was something special. Brunette with olive skin, a wide, heart-shaped face and a nose that other women in Los Angeles probably would have fixed. She had been caught by the camera in mid-laugh, and she seemed sweet and genuine. Utterly unselfconscious. A lot of femmes tense up when you take their picture. They may be smiling, but you can tell they’re worried about whether or not they look fat. She wasn’t like that at all. She was the kind of woman you fell in love with and stayed in love with. The kind you could see yourself getting old with. She was real.

Like her tits. I did mention the tits, right?

Mickey was in the photo, too, arm slung possessively around Angie’s shoulders and grinning like she just won the Lotto. Lucky bastard.

“Cute as lace pants,” I said.

“Yeah.” She looked down at the photo and then away. “What else you need to know?”

“Let’s start with the basics.” I gestured for her to sit back down, then handed her a standard form and a pen that wasn’t too badly chewed. “Full name, social security number, driver’s license number, cell number, make and model of her car with plates if you know em, plus where she lives and where she works.”

“She don’t have to work.”

Why didn’t that surprise me?

“Okay, how about you then?” I asked. “What restaurant do you work at?”

“Choux.” That little smile that wasn’t quite a smile was back. “Started washing dishes straight out of rehab and worked my way up to sauté. How did you know that?”

“That’s my job,” I said with a smirk of my own. “Choux, huh? That French fusion place on Beverly?”

“Yeah.”

“Nice,” I said, writing it down.

Mickey hunched over the form with an arm curled around it like she was worried someone might try to read over her shoulder. I let her write in silence for a minute or two.

“Things been all right between you two?” I eventually asked.

The pen froze. She didn’t answer. Didn’t look up.

“Look,” I said. “If you want me to find Angie, I’m gonna have to ask a lot of personal questions. If you can’t be honest with me upfront, then you’re wasting my time and your money.”

“Things have been good,” she said, shrugging. Still not looking up. “Better than good. We’ve been together for three years now. Every day I look at her and…” She fidgeted with the pen. “I just can’t believe it, you know?” She was trying to stay frosty, but I could see how torn up she really was over all this. “I mean, we have our fights. Who doesn’t, right? But nothing ....”

“Nothing that would make her go back to tricking?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Any family troubles? Trouble with friends?”

“Nothing with her friends that I know of. Her family…” She shrugged.

“Tell me about Angie’s history with prostitution.”

Her body language was becoming increasingly tense and conflicted, like a skittish street dog afraid to take a treat from your hand. Wanting to trust me, but fighting years of conditioning telling her to keep her mouth shut.

“She don’t like to talk about it too much,” she finally said. “But I can tell you what I know.”

“Can’t ask for more than that.”

“I know she was working outcall at first. Making big money through some kind of private agency, but blowing it all on shoes and crystal. Of course she burned that bridge pretty fast and wound up on the street.”

“Any names from back then?” I asked. “Anybody she might still be in contact with?”

Mickey shook her head, emphatic.

“She put all that behind her when she got clean. All I know is she used to work Hollywood, usually down Santa Monica. Copped there too. That’s where Chuy spotted her.”

“What about the name of the girl Chuy saw her with?”

“Goes by Lexi,” she said. “Don’t know any last name.”

“Description?”

Mickey shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

I wrote some more.

“How about contact info for this Chuy guy?”

“Jesus Nava,” she said. “Works the line at Choux.”

She rattled off a number. I wrote it down.

“Do you have an exact address for the location where she was last seen?”

She answered way too quickly.

“It’s a little white house on Sycamore, right around the corner from the YouthCenter.”

She meant the drop-in for homeless LGBT teens. I shook my head. Fucking predators. Like queer kids don’t have enough problems. I wrote it down.

 “Okay,” I said. “How you doing on that form?”

“Done,” she said, setting down the pen.

I picked up the form and looked it over. Everything in order. Mickey’s handwriting was surprisingly neat, perfect little block letters like soldiers.

“Angie wouldn’t do this,” Mickey said again. “I know her. She would never go back.”

Except that’s exactly what Angie did. What I wanted to know was why.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “If nothing else, I’ll get you some answers.”

“Just find her,” Mickey said. “She… I can’t…” She stood up abruptly. Her face was stony, but her whole body still vibrated with inarticulate anguish. “Just find her.”

3.

I showed Mickey to the door with another manly handshake, then turned to my pouting assistant.

Penny’s a grad student at USC, with a dual major in criminal law and computer science. She’ll probably break my heart someday and go get a real job with the feds, helping track down hackers and cyber criminals. Truth is, she deserves better than me. She’s a good kid.

She’s also a hammer. Half-Hispanic, half-Asian, and you’d think her two halves had been grafted together in a lab rather than mixed through the usual genetic roulette. On top, she’s a prim, willowy Korean girl with a slender waist, modest bust and a brainy, brook-no-bullshit gaze that sizes you up from behind vintage cat’s eye glasses. On the bottom, she’s J-Lo after too many trips to Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles. And you better believe she knows exactly what she’s got.

She’s tiny, barely five feet, and she’s got this sort of goth librarian look going. Long black hair twisted into a sleek bun and dark, vampy lipstick on her generous lips. Tight pencil skirts, seamed stockings and chunky heels. She can easily pass for straight, which makes her an invaluable asset when I need to get information out of people who won’t talk to someone like me.

To tell the truth, Penny is pretty much the only thing keeping this business from bankruptcy. She’s my secretary, my undercover operative, my accountant, my research assistant and my computer tech. The only thing she isn’t is my girlfriend. An oversight to which she calls my attention on a daily basis.

“Is that tattooed slut gone?” she asked, giving me a jealous glare that was only half acting.

“Yeah,” I said with a smirk and a shrug. “I let her out the back.”

“Honestly, Butch,” she said. “When are you gonna grow up and quit all this tomcatting around?”

“You mean when am I gonna realize you’re the only woman for me?”

This was our shtick, her pretending she was jealous and me pretending that I didn’t want to be with her. We’d been exchanging convoluted variations on this routine for almost two years now, and I couldn’t help but notice that she was pretending less and less, while I had to pretend a little harder every day.

“You know it’s true.” More elaborate pouting.

“You know I can’t live without you, baby,” I told her, hand on my heart. “That’s the real reason why we could never date. You’d get sick of me in a couple of days and dump my ass. Then where would I be?”

“Off chasing some other piece of flashy trash who will never make you happy,” she said. “Anyway, how do you know I’ll get sick of you if you won’t give me a chance?”

She had a point. As usual. Plus she was looking real good in that tight skirt. She knew it too, turning and cocking her hip to give me a traffic-stopping side view. I resisted, but just barely.

“Okay look,” I said, handing her Mickey’s form and the notes I’d taken on the Bedrosyan broad. “Run this name through the usual databases. Then see if you can talk to the family. Find out if they’ve seen or heard from her. I’m going go talk to Brink. Find out what LAPD’s got on our little runaway.”

“What do you need to talk to Brink for?” Penny was pouting again. “Anything she knows, I can find out quicker online.”

She was right. As usual. But information wasn’t the only thing I needed. I shook my head.

“See you later, beautiful,” I told her.

I turned to go, but she stepped into my path and held her hand out, palm up.

“Not so fast.”

“Aw, come on, Penny.”

“You owe two months on this place, three on your apartment and your license has expired. Again.”

I sighed and handed over a healthy chunk of my new bankroll. Easy come, easy fucking go. She tucked the cash into a discreet pocket, then reached up and smoothed my rumpled collar. Didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to. I looked away and felt like a heel. I told you, I don’t deserve that kid.

***

My office is two floors above one of the less savory stretches of Alvarado, in a ratty, pink stucco fire-trap that also houses a Salvadorian bakery, a Vietnamese nail salon, a questionable dental clinic and a law office specializing in Immigracion y Amnestia. I keep on telling myself I’m gonna move, but somehow I never get around to it. The bakery lady knows me and always gives me an extra pineapple semita for Penny when I stop in to grab my morning java. I love watching the rotating cast of hot young Vietnamese girls at the nail salon painting each other’s toenails when business is slow. I’m comfortable here.

The gritty August heat was all over me like a groupie the second I stepped out into the street. It was even hotter inside my piece of shit Plymouth Sport Fury. The cracked not-so-white vinyl seats flash-fried my ass through my jeans the second I sat down. The wheel was almost too hot to touch.

I cranked the ignition a few times, eventually bullying the Fury into turning over. When it finally caught, the engine blasted me with hot air through every vent. No AC, of course. The reluctant beast needed a minute to get used to the idea of running, so I pulled out my phone and texted Brink. She was available. We agreed to meet at the usual place.

I suppose I oughta tell you I used to be a cop. The less said about that, the better, but I still have a friend or two on the force. Chief among them is my sparring partner and occasional fuck-buddy, Brink Bannon. Though she’s as out as I am, Brink managed to sidestep a lot of the problems I had during my blue period by keeping her head down, playing by the rules and not punching any superior officers in the face. She made detective a year ago. Whenever I need a peek at police records, she’s who I call.

The usual place was the Short Stop. Back in the day it was a cop bar. Now it’s just another SilverLake hipster joint. Lots of bad 80’s hair, skinny jeans and ugly-ass glasses with no lenses. Brink and I still use it as a rendezvous spot when we want to hook up, partly for old times sake, and partly because no other cops would be caught dead there anymore.

Apparently, neither would Brink. She waved me over from her unmarked Caprice as soon as I pulled into the parking lot. I coasted into the spot beside her and she rolled down her passenger-side window.

Brink is muscular and clean-cut with big hands and straight white teeth. Sandy hair chopped high and tight. Beefy shoulders and skull-crushing Tyrannosaurus thighs furred with fine, golden down. She looks like a Mormon quarterback but fucks like a wolverine.

It can be pretty tough to find an older butch that’s into other butches. Especially here, in L.A. Funny, when you consider how often you see butch men together. And like I said before, I’m an omnivore, but Brink, she’s not like that. Lipstick leaves her cold. It’s tragic too, because femmes’ll be all over her and she’ll sit there pining over some stone electrician who would never give her the time of day. That’s what makes her such a reliable play-date. She’s always horny and rarely getting any. She’s also one of my best and oldest friends. Good cop to my bad cop. Tango to my Cash. Even though she looks way more like Kurt Russell than I do. Anyway, my point is that she’s got my back.

“Get in,” she said. “I’ll drive.”

I didn’t bother to lock the Fury. There’s no glass in the driver’s side window, nothing of value inside the car and nobody in their right mind would want to steal that crotchety old beast. If they did, they were welcome to it.

I opened the passenger-side door of the Caprice and got in.

As soon as I sat down, Brink threw a playful cross at my shoulder. I caught her wrist, gripped a fistful of her neatly pressed dress shirt and kissed her.

She threw herself into that kiss like she was starving for it, and her hunger brought mine to life again, stronger than before. I let it burn for a minute or two, then broke the kiss, slid my forearm across her throat, and shoved her back against the driver’s seat.

“Drive,” I told her.

She grinned.

“I thought you had some questions for me.”

“Pleasure before business.”

“That’s the way I like it,” she said, cranking the engine.

I smiled. She drove.

4.

We wound up in Elysian Park. Brink turned into a “Park Personnel Only” service road that wound through a stand of close set trees.

“You gonna fuck me?” I asked. “Or kill me and toss my body in the reservoir?”

“I’m not gonna kill you,” she said. “Not until after, anyway.”

After a few more twists and turns we came to a gravel lot filled with dusty back-hoes and parks department maintenance vehicles. She pulled into the shade between a dump truck and a padlocked storage shed and then cut the engine.

This was a risky location for our little tryst. If we were a couple of cute femmes going at it, the city workers that frequent this area would probably cheer us on and enjoy the show. Me and Brink, we don’t turn straight men on. Just piss them off. We even got mistaken for gay guys once, and let me tell you those sorry knuckleheads were more surprised to find out we had vaginas than they were to find out we had guns. Of course, if we were ever in a situation where we were compelled to fire those guns, it would cause an endless shitstorm of paperwork for Brink.

Like that ever stopped her.

She unfastened her seatbelt and reached for me but I dodged her grasping hands and slipped out of the car.

“You want some of this?” I backed away, unbuttoning my jeans. “Come get it.”

“Fuck yeah,” she said, climbing out of the car after me.

Of course I wasn’t going make it easy.

I put one hand in the center of her chest and slid the other down into my open jeans. She could have easily pushed my arm aside, but didn’t. She let me hold her back, breath coming hard and fast.

Making her wait was almost as hard on me as it was on her. I slid my hand up from her chest and around the back of her neck to pull her into another voracious kiss.

She had this warm, wholesome, clean laundry smell that always made me want to get her dirty. I broke the kiss, pulled my other hand out of my jeans and smeared my juices across her flushed face. She sucked greedily at my fingers.

“You need it bad, don’t you?” I asked, mouth a hot inch from her ear.

“Yes, sir,” she replied.

I smiled against her neck.

“Yeah, you do.”

I gripped her throat and slid my other hand down between her muscular legs. Her pulse hammered beneath my palm. I could feel how wet she was through the cheap fabric of her JC Penney slacks. I teased her a little, then shoved her away. She staggered but managed to stay on her feet, teeth bared and eyes wide and hungry.

“You ready to get to work, boy?”

I leaned back against the hood of the car, dropping my jeans to my knees and giving her an eyeful.

“Yes, sir,” she said, eyes locked on my exposed cunt.

I was ready too, beyond ready, but I still made her wait some more.

“Undress,” I said.

She cast a quick glance around the deserted yard, then set her shaking fingers to the task of buttons and zippers. She struggled briefly with her scuffed Doc Martens dress shoes and crumpled black socks, and then she was naked in the hot afternoon sun.

Brink always seems kind of awkward and uncomfortable in her utilitarian, unflattering work clothes. Shirts too tight in the shoulders and too loose in the waist. Pants baggy and bunched up around her belt. But naked, she was stunning.

She has a handful of freckles scattered across her broad chest and tiny, barely pink nipples capping her single-scoop tits. A lean waist and strong, sculpted abs with a thin golden treasure trail from her shallow navel to her wild, reddish-blond bush. And those legs, those powerful thighs and bulky, brutish calves.

She was even more jacked than the last time we’d hooked up. I guess when you rarely get laid, you gotta to do something to blow off steam. She’d clearly been hitting the gym hard. Looking at her flawless physique made me feel both aroused and competitive in equal measure.

Every muscle in her finely tuned body was tense and humming with desire. An athlete, coiled and waiting for the starter pistol. I couldn’t wait any longer.

“Now,” I said.

She was on me in half a heartbeat, like an unleashed attack dog. Kneeling in the dirt and ravenous mouth on my clit, pushing me right to the edge and over before I knew what hit me.

Damn, I needed that. 

She still wanted more and I sure wasn’t gonna stop her. She kept at me, working it, pushing me, and I just couldn’t seem to get enough. All that built-up frustration dissolved under her tongue as I hit another orgasm and then a third. My legs felt weak, and my clit was throbbing and hyper-sensitive, almost painful by the time I finally pushed her away.

“That’s enough, boy,” I told her. I held out my hand, palm up. “Get the lube.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, voice gone thick and husky.

She pulled a bottle of Astroglide from an inner pocket in a large leather messenger bag in the back seat and tossed it to me.

“You know what to do,” I said.

She did. Leaving the rear door of the Caprice open, she sprawled on her back across the seat, muscular legs cocked wide.

I smiled and upended the bottle of lube, slicking both my hands and drenching her flushed pussy. She had a monster clit, a souvenir from an ill-advised flirtation with Winstrol back in college, and it twitched when the lube hit it. Like it knew exactly what was coming. She threw her head back and made a small, breathless sound of anticipation.

I started with two fingers. Then four. Right hand jacking that massive clit while I worked my left fingers in deeper, palm slowly folding inward, like I was trying to escape from handcuffs.

“Look at me, boy,” I told her.

She opened her eyes, locking her gaze with mine as the wide bridge of my knuckles twisted and slid inside her, centimeter by excruciating centimeter.

“Tell me how bad you need this,” I said.

“Bad,” she breathed. “So… fucking…bad…” The head of my thumb joined my other fingers. Her eyes closed, then opened wide. “Sir.”

And just like that, my whole hand was inside her.

In that moment, I fell in love with her a little, the way I always did. Neither one of us had illusions about being anything more than friends. Me, I guess you could say I’m a sucker for the stereotype. Always had it in the back of my mind that someday I’d hang up my strap-on and settle down with a pretty little femme. Someday being a good long way away from now. Brink, she knew she needed more commitment than a tom cat like me could ever give her. What she needed was a full-time dyke-Daddy, and while it was fun to play that role every now and then, I couldn’t see myself locked into that action 24/7. But I’ll tell you what, the way that Brink looked at me when my hand slipped all the way inside her made me forget all that.

She was so fucking beautiful in that moment. Slick with sweat, gritty dirt stuck to her shins and battered red knees. Breathing heavy, teeth clenched and sleek belly heaving. Savage almost, like some kind of mythical animal that normal people would never be allowed to see. All our convoluted history and the mundane details of the job and the ugly, unforgiving world around us just burned away. Her eyes were dilated, nothing but the thinnest blue rings around bottomless black pupils. That gaze was so honest, so raw and intimate, it made me feel like I was falling. Like I had my hand inside her hot, beating heart.

Unlike Miss Diva Derringer, Brink’s a one-hit wonder. She’ll only have the one orgasm, but when it comes, she’ll just about tear your hand off. I could feel it building up fast inside her, and I held onto that gaze, greedy and drawing out the moment for as long as I could. Savoring it the way you do with any beautiful thing that doesn’t last.

Then she came. Her eyes rolled up and closed, and that connection was lost. Vanished into the ether like a dropped cell-phone call. She was alone with her orgasm, pulled under by the crashing waves and lost to me. All I could do was ride it out until it was over.

When she came back to her senses, she was grinning and a little sheepish. I withdrew my hand slowly and she shuddered, laughing and wrapping her arms around her sweaty ribs. I stretched my freed fingers, clenching and unclenching. Making sure they were all still there.

We never kissed or cuddled afterward. There was always this slight sense of awkward embarrassment between us. Not shame over what we’d done. More like a need to look politely away while everybody got their armor back on.

“God damn,” she said, rolling away from me and sitting up. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Actions speak louder,” I replied, buttoning my fly.

This was a kind of ritual too. Cracking wise. Making it not matter. Burying any remnants of that intimate connection like scraps of blood-stained evidence.

“So,” she said, unballing one of her socks and shaking out the dust. “What’s this case of yours?”

I filled her in while she got herself cleaned up and dressed.

“And you figured you’d fuck me into a puddle and then make unauthorized use of police records while I lay here in a dopamine coma?”

“Something like that.” I shrugged and grinned. “You know, run her name for priors. See who salutes.”

She got into the front seat, swiveled the on-board laptop my way and started up the car.

“Have at it,” she said. “You earned it.”

I typed in Angie’s name, and the results of the search popped up on the greasy screen. Angie’s last bust was more than three years old, which seemed consistent with Mickey’s timeline.  Before that there had been a year-long string of low-level felonies and misdemeanors. Solicitation, public lewdness, possession, petty theft. I clicked on one of the later solicitation arrests, looking to see if she had been picked up with someone else. She had. There were a handful of names. A corner sweep. No “Lexi,” though that could have been a nickname for any one of those women.

I jotted down the names on my notepad, then clicked on another report. More names, and two from the previous – Lisa Peña and Jennifer Traynor. I underlined them, then clicked on a third report. Lisa and Jennifer showed up again, along with a name from the second report – Shawna Butler. I underlined her name too, then did searches for them all. Shawna was dead, ODed a year before. The other two had both had catch-and-release arrests within the last three months. Lisa appeared to either be homeless or unwilling to commit an address, but Jennifer gave a home addresses in the vicinity of Western and Santa Monica. Not too far from the place where Mickey said Angie had been seen. I copied the address and tried to memorize their mug shots.

“What’s your plan?” Brink asked, pulling the car into the parking lot at the Short Stop.

“No fucking idea,” I said. “But it’ll be brilliant.”

“Wanna get a bite?” she asked. “I’m starving.”

“I’ll take a raincheck,” I told her. “I gotta run down this Bedrosyan broad. Next week?”

“I’ll bring the chainsaw,” she said, like she always says.

“I’ll bring the beer,” I replied, like I always do.

5.

I had two choices at that point. See if Ms. Traynor was in, or try staking out the house on Sycamore and waiting for my little lost femme to show up at the salt-lick. Sitting on the Sycamore house in my unairconditioned Fury on an August afternoon wasn’t my idea of a good time.

The address on Virginia Avenue turned out to be a sad old brick apartment building overlooking the 101 freeway. The heavy-duty security bars on the windows and doors had been painted gaudy teal blue in a misguided effort to make them seem less depressing. There was a red and white FOR RENT sign with a space beneath for handwritten details. There may have been something written there at one time, but whatever it said had long since faded to illegibility.

The name on the buzzer for 3C was Bloom, not Traynor, but I pushed it anyway and was buzzed in without a word from the battered speaker.

The interior of the building smelled recently fumigated. I couldn’t decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing. The narrow, claustrophobic space that passed itself off as a lobby was grim and shabby. Cracked tile. Crowded rows of repeatedly violated mailboxes. Drifts of take-out menus in the corners like unraked autumn leaves. There was a shadowy stairway in the rear. I took it up to the third floor.

When I knocked on 3C, Jennifer answered the door in lingerie. Cheap, scratchy rayon junk, but that didn’t take away from what was underneath it.

Big, natural tits pushed up high. Chunky legs and hips. Solid curves that would probably tip over into fat if she ever got off the glass diet. She was pale for an Angeleno, and she’d dyed her blond hair black since the mug shot I saw, making her skin look even more wan and lifeless. Lots of bad, seemingly random ink, like she’d thrown darts at the flash on a tattoo-shop wall. Her eyebrows had been plucked away and painted back on, and her lips were chapped under chalky maroon lipstick. Her heavy makeup didn’t quite cover all the raw sores on her face from endless, crank-fueled skin-picking. She looked at me like I was a flaming bag of dog shit some kids had left on the doorstep. She was obviously expecting someone else.

“Hey, Jen,” I said, gambling on a common diminutive form of her name and hoping she wasn’t a Jenny. “I’m a friend of Angie’s, and I was wondering…”

“Who?”

She took a wary step back, squinting at me and ready to shut the door.

“Angie Bedrosyan,” I said. “Armenian girl, dark hair, big tits.”

“Never heard of her.”

She tried to shut the door on me, but I wedged a shoe into the door jam.

“Get the fuck out!” She slammed the door several times on my foot, then kicked it like a frustrated child. “I’m totally calling the cops right now!”

“Go ahead,” I said, pushing the door the rest of the way open. “Ask for Detective Dan Lietner with the Narcotics division. He’d be glad to come over and evaluate the situation.” I held out my cell phone. “Would you like to use my phone?”

She didn’t take the phone.

“What do you want?” she asked, backing away and picking at a scab on the back of her left hand.

I stepped inside. It was a single man’s apartment. That fact would have been screamingly obvious even if not for the stack of overdue utility bills addressed to a Michael C. Bloom. Grungy, corpse-colored carpet that had never encountered a vacuum cleaner. Wrinkled action-movie posters that seemed tacked up mostly to cover cracks and stains in the used-to-be white walls. Lots of beer cans and inside-out sweat socks. A lingering smell of old French fries and microwave burritos. One fat, comfortable chair in front of the big-screen TV and a sorry-ass floral sofa shoved off to one side that looked like it had been left behind by somebody’s dead grandmother. The low thrift-store table held an open laptop, half-a-dozen remote controls, a large bottle of supermarket-brand hand lotion and a box of tissues. And in the middle of all this bachelor funk, like a continuity error, was Jennifer in her see-through purple panties.

“Does Mike know you’re tricking out of his apartment?” I asked.

“He loves me,” she said, instantly defensive. “He supports me no matter what. He said I can stay as long as I need to. Until I get back on my feet and save up enough for a deposit.” She raised her voice, strident and on the edge of breaking. “I have every right to be here! He supports me no matter what!”

“No matter what, huh?” I said. “You’re pretty lucky to have someone who’s really there for you like that. So I guess it’d be no big deal if I gave him a call right now. Just to compliment him on his open-minded generosity.”

“Wait,” Her already wide eyes went wider. “Ok, listen. Please. I just need this one last date and then I’ll have enough for a deposit…”

 I stepped around the coffee table so I could see the screen of the laptop. A chat window was open, displaying an explicit exchange between  “buttlovr” and “SexiLexi.” Bingo.

I like to tell chicks I’m trying to impress that my job is all about me being this master criminalist with a black belt in deductive reasoning, but so much of the time it’s just dumb luck. I’m willing to bet that even Sherlock Fucking Holmes got a random lucky break every now and then.

“Listen, Lexi,” I said. “I know you’ve been copping with Angie. All I want to know is where to find her, and you’ll never see me again.”

“And you won’t tell Mike?”

“I won’t tell Mike.”

“Vivian Lane,” she said, picking at a scab above her left eyebrow while her gaze flicked away and back, away and back.

“Who?”

“The Vivian Lane modeling agency,” she said. “Angie’s working for Vivian again. That’s all I know, okay. Fuck!”

There was a light, timid knock on the door, and Jennifer jumped like she’d been goosed.

“Oh!” She put both hands on my chest and shoved me back towards the door. I let her. “Seriously, you gotta go now.”

I opened to door to a pudgy Asian guy in an airport security uniform clutching a sad cellophane cone of supermarket carnations and a six pack of light beer. I wondered if this was “buttlovr.”

“She’s all yours, stud,” I told him, clapping him on the shoulder a little too hard on my way out.

6.

I decided to do a little sniffing around Vivian Lane before proceeding. I sat in my sweltering Fury with the driver’s-side door propped open and my aging laptop balanced on my knees, making with the Googles. At first glance, the Vivian Lane modeling agency looked like a legit business operating out of an office on Beverly Drive just south of Wilshire. Perusing their clean, minimalist website, I scrolled through dozens of photos of beautiful women. All fully dressed in various classy, stylish outfits. When I clicked any one of the photos, I was taken to that model’s individual portfolio, listing her height, weight, measurements, dress size and shoe size. They all had names like Daniela and Hannah and Corrine. Nothing too obviously phony or porno-ish. No mention of escort services, but there were a hundred little tells that gave away the real nature of their business.

For starters, most of the women were under 5’8,” the fashion industry’s standard minimum for print models. Many were also way too curvy for the catwalk. But the biggest tip-off was in their eyes.

Fashion models either look arrogantly away into the distance or make shallow, shark-eyes at the camera. They know they’re just the stuff inside clothes, esthetically pleasing manikins whose job it is to make you drop three grand on an ugly handbag. They arrange their faces and bodies with an implicit understanding that they’ll be looked at primarily by straight women and gay men. The Vivian Lane models were presenting themselves to a straight male gaze. All smolder and come-hither, giving the camera both barrels. Lips parted, leaning in as if acquiescing. Selling themselves, not their clothes.

The contact info on the website offered an email address and a 310 phone number. I called the number. A chilly, businesslike female voice answered on the third ring.

“VivianLaneAgency.”

“Yeah, hi,” I said, pitching my voice low. “I was hoping to book a shoot for this evening.”

“What’s the name of the referring photographer?”

Shit. That was gonna be a problem.

“Well, I was just looking at your website here, and…”

“I’m sorry.” She obviously wasn’t. “We can’t help you without a referral.”

Before I could come up with anything clever, the connection was severed. I looked down at my phone and then back at the laptop screen. This was gonna require a whole other level of clever.

I scrolled through my contacts and dialed a different number. This one was picked up halfway through the first ring.

“Butch?”

“Preston,” I said. “How’s tricks?”

“Is this about Zara?” Concern crept into the flat, slightly nasal male voice on the other end of the line. “Is she okay?”

A few months back, I helped a friend of Preston Payne. The kind of friend you pay for. Of course, I don’t judge, since he paid me, too. Anyway this friend, who calls herself “Zara” although her real name is Karen Kleppen, was having problems with anonymous threats. A stalker kind of thing. It was a no-brainer. Took me less than six hours to finger an ex-boyfriend, a married man who didn’t want the affair to end. Took me less than six minutes to convince him it was in his best interest to find a different hooker to stalk. Easy peasy. Anyway, the long and short of it was that a guy who knows a lot of call girls owed me a favor.

“She’s fine,” I assured him, although with her track record the odds of that being a lie were better than 50/50. “But listen, I need to ask you something. What do you know about an agency called Vivian Lane?”

I could hear him cover up the phone with his hand, talking in a soft voice to someone in the room.

“You’d better come over,” he said.

Preston lived up near the top of ColdwaterCanyon with his elderly mother. It was a good ten degrees cooler up there than down in the flats. The large ranch-style house had a low profile, barely visible from the head of the gated driveway. I punched a grimy plastic button, told the outdated intercom speaker who I was and got buzzed through the gate.

When I knocked, Evelyn Payne answered the door. Yes, that Evelyn Payne. Legendary femme fatale, star of Killer in Lace, Shadow Street and Backhand. Preston is her only son. Adopted, because Evelyn didn’t want to ruin her figure. It worked. At 83, she still looked fantastic. Classy and chic, with her silver hair flawlessly coiffed and just enough make-up to look fresh and put-together without tipping over into Baby Jane Hudson. However, it was immediately clear that her figure was not the problem.

She wasn’t wearing any pants. Her top half was clad in a vintage Oscar de la Renta blouse, raspberry silk with a large bow at the neck. The lower half was buck naked except for a pair of knee-high nylons and cream suede kitten heels. It was nothing I wanted to see.

“Oh, thank goodness you’ve finally arrived,” she said, taking my hand. “I’ve been waiting for hours!”

 “Mrs. Payne!” A stocky, middle-aged Filipina nurse came running to the door. “No, no Mrs. Payne…”

“It’s MS. Payne,” she said, suddenly imperious. Every inch the movie star, giving the nurse that famous ice-blue glare that had unmanned some of the top film noir tough-guys back in the day. “How many times do I have to tell you that, you fucking idiot?”

Hearing Evelyn Payne swear was almost worth the peep at her 83-year-old muff. Almost.

“So sorry,” the nurse said to me in an unsubtle stage-whisper. “Please come in. I’ll tell Mr. Payne you are here.” She raised her voice to a high-pitched holler. “Okay now, Ms. Payne. Let’s go put your pants back on.”

“Honestly, Richard,” she said to me. “It’s days like this when I wonder why I even bother to get out of bed anymore.”

Evelyn let go of my hand and allowed the nurse to lead her away while I stepped down into a huge sunken living room that looked like it had been fossilized some time around 1953. Lots of coral velour, abstract art and faceless ceramic nudes. It even smelled like the 50s, cigarettes and martinis and Miss Dior perfume.

Above the blocky, modernist fireplace, there was a large, framed color photo. Chilly blonde goddess Evelyn in her prime, ferociously chic in Chanel couture and holding a cherubic, tow-headed Preston like an unfamiliar prop that had just been handed to her seconds before the shutter clicked.

The real live Preston appeared about a minute later. His blond hair was thinning and mostly gray. The big, wide-set blue eyes and girlish, rosebud lips that had been so cute at age three had translated badly into adulthood, giving him the look of a chubby, chinless goldfish. His rumpled clothes were expensive, but twenty years out of date. No shoes. He was a good five inches shorter than me and had a nervous habit of tapping his thumbs against his middle fingers.

“We’d better go outside,” he said instead of a greeting.

I followed him out into the back yard, which was long and narrow and dominated by an angular pool. On the far end, in the shade of a flowering mimosa tree, there was a pebbled glass table and four chairs with faded floral cushions. Preston took the chair that was the farthest away from the house and motioned for me to sit beside him. I did. The lumpy cushion felt like a bag of rocks under my ass.

 I already knew he probably wouldn’t have booked Angie. She wasn’t his type. He preferred tall, elegant blondes. Like Evelyn. You see, Preston was basically paying mommy to love him.

Vivian Lane did have several young Evelyns on her website. I was willing to bet that Preston could be leaned on to give me a referral.

“Tell me about the Vivian Lane agency,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Missing-person case.”

“Missing person?” He blinked at me like he didn’t understand English.

“Missing girl,” I said. “Her…” I almost said girlfriend, but caught myself, wanting him to relate and feel sympathetic. “Her boyfriend is very worried about her. She used to work for Vivian Lane.”

“Right, okay,” he said. “Right.”

He ducked his head and picked at the silky pink threads of a mimosa blossom that had fallen onto the glass tabletop.

“Vivian is very careful.” He flicked away some of the sticky threads. “You can’t book a date without a referral. Not just a name either, they actually call that person to make sure you’re okay. And she’s pricy too. A thousand dollars an hour, and there’s a two-hour minimum. Plus there’s a five hundred dollar consulting fee for your first date. Non-refundable if you cancel.”

I shook my head.

“That’s quite a price tag.”

 “Her girls are nice,” he said, nervous fingers clicking together like insect legs. “Not just pretty, you know? They act nice. That’s why it costs so much. Beauty is cheap in this town. Nice is a lot harder to come by.”

I thought back to Angie’s sweet, smiling photograph. I could see how it might be worth twenty five hundred bucks to have that smile pointed at me. On the drive up the hill, I had debated the best approach to take with Preston, thinking I’d lean on him by threatening to tell mommy dearest about her hooker doppelgangers. But seeing first hand the state that she was in, I figured that just wasn’t gonna fly. Plus, I kinda felt sorry for him, this sad, stunted creature still cowering in his famous mother’s shadow. Just wanting somebody to be nice to him. I decided to stick with the sympathy angle.

“This girl that’s missing,” I said. “She’s a nice girl, too. Just like Zara.”

I studied his face, wondering if I’d sold it a little too hard. But he was looking up at me like a child worried over a sick pet. Now all I had to do was take his candy.

“Do you think she’ll be okay?”

“She will if I have anything to say about it,” I told him, moving in for the easy score. “If I could get a referral, I could get into Vivian Lane’s office and maybe find out some useful information.”

“Well,” he began, then trailed off.

They had a hell of a view from up here. Overlooking the Valley, not Beverly Hills, but still. From up here, everything looked soft-focus and dreamy. Pretty, even though it was really just the smog. I waited.

“I was thinking,” he continued. “I haven’t heard from Zara for a while now. Maybe…”

I had to laugh.

“You trying to haggle with me, Preston?”

“I just thought…” He blinked several times in rapid succession, then looked away. “Maybe you could make sure she’s okay.”

I could find out where Zara was and what she was up to with one hand tied behind my back, but I had no way of making sure she was okay. In fact, her being okay was pretty fucking unlikely. I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“You got it,” I said instead. “And when Vivian calls, you’ll vouch for me, right?”

“Preston?” Evelyn’s voice. “Preston!”

“I should…” He indicated the patio door with the bundle of wattled skin that would have been a chin if he had one.

He stood and so did I, stepping into his path and cutting him off.

“We have a deal, right?”

“Right,” he said, pulling his head down between his stooped shoulders like a turtle. “Okay, right.”

“PRESTON!” Evelyn’s voice was starting to sound raw and panicky.

I stepped out of his way and let him go to his mother.

7.

The receptionist at the Vivian Lane agency was a barracuda. While the models had all been hired for their ability to say yes, this woman had obviously been hired for her ability to say no.

She was a tall, chilly beauty with bittersweet chocolate skin and perfect posture. Regal cheekbones and a long, elegant neck. She wore her hair natural and clipped short, barely a quarter inch from her scalp. No jewelry, just a tiny, ultramodern headset mike. Her white silk skirt suit was pristine, like dirt wouldn’t dare go near her. The body beneath the modestly-cut suit was flawlessly sculpted in that lean, leggy, supermodel kind of way, but her icy gaze let you know not to even bother looking.

Her pale silk stockings whispered as she crossed her long legs and looked up at me over the top of her sleek designer glasses. I could see that she was trying to figure me out as I crossed the vast expanse of expensive white carpet to reach her spindly glass desk. She didn’t seem to be having any luck with that.

“May I help you?” she asked in a tone that was anything but helpful.

I recognized her voice from my earlier call. I wondered if she might recognize mine.

“My name is Roberta Fatale,” I said. “I’d like to book a shoot.”

She gave my rumpled duds a skeptical once over, but swiftly segued into her familiar script.

“What’s the name of the referring photographer?”

“Preston Payne.”

“Just a moment please,” she said.

She turned away and banged out a rapid-fire burst of typing. Paused, typed again, then turned back to me.

“Miss Lane will be with you shortly, as soon as your referral can be confirmed. Have a seat.”

She indicated a modernist interpretation of a sofa that was clinically designed to be as attractive yet unwelcoming as she was. I sat, but I wasn’t happy about it.

There was no music in the office. Not that I’m a huge fan of Muzak or anything, but it sure beats sitting in uncomfortable silence with that arctic receptionist. I looked down at my hands, then rubbed at a smudge on the left cuff of my shirt. Probably dirt from the Elysian Park maintenance lot, picked up during my rowdy tumble with Brink.

I let my mind wander down that pleasant path for a minute or two. When I glanced over at the receptionist, she was looking right back at me. She turned away the second our gazes connected, but not quickly enough to hide the fact that she had been checking me out and liked what she saw.

Was I imagining things? Her expression slipped instantly back into chilly neutral, but for a second there, I could have sworn…

I hadn’t been all that into her a minute ago, but now she had my full attention. One of the first things you have to learn before you get your P.I. training wheels taken off is how to watch someone without letting them know they’re being watched. As a result, I’ve developed excellent peripheral vision.

I relaxed my face into a bored, soft-focus mask, staring idly at a large, framed blow-up of a 1981 Vogue magazine cover featuring a tawny California girl with big hair and a bigger smile. I was really watching the receptionist out of the corner of my eye. Nothing happened for several minutes. She tapped away at her keyboard, ignoring me. Then, a pause in the sound of typing followed by a split-second test glance in my direction. More typing, then another hummingbird glance. She must have convinced herself that I wasn’t paying attention to her at that point. There was some paper shuffling and putting away of stray pens, then she looked back at me. This time, her gaze lingered. 

A second heartbeat took up residence between my legs and I could feel my face flush. I found myself imagining what it might be like to melt that permafrost with my tongue. To break down her walls and make her lose control. I let her watch me for a few more heartbeats and was just about to turn back to meet her gaze again when an unmarked door opened.

The receptionist and I both jumped a little, both of us acting strangely embarrassed. Caught somehow, even though absolutely nothing had happened between us. Which seemed to confirm that I hadn’t been imagining things.

The California girl from the Vogue cover came out of the open door and walked over to me. She was obviously older but still quite stunning. Her big, brassy hair had been cut into a soft bob and dyed a cool, ash-blond. The body under her crisp linen trousers and gossamer blouse was slender and aggressively fit. I could tell that she’d had some work done on her face, a few subtle nips and tucks, but nothing freakish. There was a Tiffany key on a heavy chain around her neck. I was willing to bet it was platinum, not silver.

“Ms. Fatale,” she said, smile just as big and bright as ever. And just as fake. “I’m Vivian Lane.”

She offered a bony, manicured hand. I stood and shook it. It felt like a bundle of twigs wrapped in leather. Hands are one of the few things the plastic surgeons can’t fix. Not yet anyway.

“This way, please.”

She walked over to the open door. I looked back over my shoulder at the receptionist. She was not looking at me so hard I was afraid she might sprain something. I smiled, just a little and then followed Vivian through the door.

On the other side of the door was a different world. Where the outer office had been designed to make you uncomfortable, this room was like a brown leather womb. Soothing, warm neutral color palate with lots of burnished wood and low, recessed lighting. Plush, deep-pile carpet and plenty of comfy, overstuffed armchairs. It had the look of an expensive cigar bar without the smell. There was music too, even though I couldn’t spot any speakers. Something gentle, vague and approximately jazz-like. Auditory lube.

“Before we get started,” she said. “You’re aware of our consultation fee?”

I was and told her so.

“So if you don’t mind ...”

“Ah, right. Of course.” I took out my wallet, holding it angled so that she couldn’t see the five hundred bucks I was about to give her would pretty much clean me out. I had given all the rest of Mickey’s money to Penny and had no idea how I was going to pay for a date if I actually managed to get one. I’d cross that bridge when I had to.

“Excellent,” Miss Lane said, still smiling, snapping up the fan of hundreds and making them disappear. “I was just going to make myself a cappuccino.” That smile just didn’t quit. It was starting to give me a sunburn. “Can I offer you something? Coffee? Something stronger perhaps?”

“Cappuccino would be great, thanks.”

I hate milk in coffee, but I’ve found that people are always more agreeable when they think you like the same things that they like.

“Have a seat,” she told me. “And you’ll find several tablet computers on that coffee table. Each one contains our interactive model database. Feel free to browse while you’re waiting.”

She walked over to a long art deco bar that held a full-sized professional espresso machine as well as a selection of pricy wine and top-shelf booze. I sat in a cozy chair and picked up one of the tablets.

I woke up the sleek machine, and was presented with a screen wallpapered by the austere Vivian Lane logo. There were none of the standard icons. No email, contacts, settings or calendar. Just three oversized thumbnails, each featuring a beautiful woman’s face and each labeled with a category. Blondes, redheads, brunettes. I tapped brunettes and was presented with a whole new set of categories. The options were amazingly specific. Not only could I pick what ethnicity or what body type I liked, I could actually select what type of vagina I preferred. An “innie,” meaning small, hidden inner lips, or an “outie,” meaning larger inner lips that protrude beyond the outer lips. This was more complicated than buying a new car.

I picked big breasts and was given a list of models. There seemed to be twice as many women as there were on the public website, but no Angie. I tapped a thumbnail of a busty, dulce-de-leche knockout named Alejandra and was taken to a page of nude photos and explicit video clips. I backed up and chose another woman. Same deal, all good. I could have lost the whole day scrolling through those pics, but I had a job to do.

“Can I access this database from home?” I asked, wondering what kind of electronic mojo Penny could do with something like this. “In case I have trouble deciding today?”

 Vivian shot me a look like I’d just asked if I could have cookies before dinner.

“I’m afraid not,” she said, pausing for the harsh, dragon-hiss of the espresso machine’s milk frothing nozzle. “But if you let me know what you’re looking for, maybe I can make some suggestions.”

“I like big tits,” I told her. “Real big tits, not implants.”

She came over to the table with a cup in each hand, then set one down in front of me and the other by an opposite chair. The froth on top of the cappuccinos had been carefully swirled into perfect heart shapes. By the time I realized she had gone back to the bar, she’d returned with a plate of small, chocolate dipped biscotti and a bowl of raw brown sugar lumps. She was way too good at this. Like Martha Stewart had decided to become a madam.

“Is nipple size a factor?” she asked, placing the biscotti where I could easily reach them.

I suppressed a snicker at the idea of discussing nipple size with Martha Stewart. I had no idea what Angie’s nipples were like.

“Not really,” I said, trying to come up with a slick way to ask for Angie without actually asking for her. “What I want is a very feminine brunette with a nice smile.”

“And big tits.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And big tits.”

She sat opposite from me and lifted her cup off its saucer.

“Try Eve.”

There was an alphabetic sorting option in the upper left corner. I picked E and then chose Eve. If there was an academy award for psychic matchmaking, Vivian would have won hands down right then and there.

Eve was a curvy little bundle of trouble with mischievous green eyes and a smile like she was just about to share a juicy secret. Waist length, blue-black hair and goth-pale skin embellished with delicate, lacy tattoos. Perfect hourglass build, ass for days and big, buoyant natural tits that gave Angie a run for her money. If I were picking for me, the hunt would have ended right there. It wasn’t easy to act like she wasn’t what I was looking for.

“Maybe not so many tattoos.” I hadn’t seen any tattoos in the photo of Angie, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have some that weren’t visible in that particular shot. “And I’d like more of a natural brunette. You know, with brown eyes.”

Vivian seemed genuinely surprised that I didn’t like her pick.

“Okay, well, what about Alejandra?”

“I looked at her already.” I shrugged. “Gorgeous, but not exactly what I was hoping for. I want more of a warm, friendly girl-next-door type. Less sexpot and more sweet. Maybe…” I knew I was probably pushing it here, but went for it anyway. “Maybe Middle Eastern, or…”

Vivian was starting to get that pained, panicky look of a hostess whose fancy dinner party isn’t going well, until I said Middle Eastern. Then, her face lit up, and the big smile was back.

“Well,” she said, taking a dainty sip of her cappuccino and then setting it back in the saucer. “There is one girl.”

She picked up one of the tablets, tapped in some kind of access code and opened a hidden file, revealing dozens and dozens of unsorted, unretouched photos.

“She took some time off, so I haven’t had a chance to add her back into the database yet.” She handed me the tablet. “She’s very popular. She’s Armenian.”

The photos were labeled “Tamara,” but it was Angie. I wanted to do a touchdown dance, but restrained myself. I clicked to enlarge several of the photos, evaluating them like I wasn’t sure.

These shots had been hastily taken in the room we were sitting in. In one she was standing by the curtained windows. In another, she was bending over a chair. In the next, sitting on the same chair, legs open. If I thought I had a hard time seeing past those tits when she was dressed, it was even harder now. Not to mention the rest of her. But I had no choice, so I cranked up the mental cold shower and bullied my brain back to work.

It turned out she did have one small tattoo, a slender flowering vine around her left ankle. I could see faint pink lines where her bra and panties had been just moments before. She was smiling in every shot, but nothing like the smile in the photo with Mickey. This smile seemed like a small, brittle shield held up against a rain of flaming arrows. My heart hurt for her. And for Mickey.

I wondered again what the hell was really going on. If Angie had a home and money and a girlfriend that loved her, why would she go back to this? It couldn’t just be drugs. Or could it?

“This is the one,” I told Vivian.

“Good choice,” she replied.

She extracted a slim smart phone from a trouser pocket, tapped the screen a few times, then held it to her ear. She frowned slightly, then spoke.

“Tamara,” she said, turning slightly away from me. “I have a new client who is very interested in booking a shoot with you. Please call the office as soon as you get this message. Thank you.”

She ended the call.

“Unfortunately, she is not available right now.” She switched the phone from hand to hand like she was nervous about something. “But I can contact you as soon as I hear back from her, and we can make arrangements for an appointment then.”

Watching her fidgeting with the phone, I was hit with a sudden idea that was either going to be very smart or very stupid. I reached for my untouched cappuccino and knocked it over, spilling the hot, milky liquid towards the tablet computer that had the unsorted photo files open on its screen.

She hissed and leapt to her feet, lunging forward to rescue the threatened tablet. In her hurry to save the tablet, she dropped her phone.

“Shit,” I said, setting the cup back on its saucer and gathering up the other two tablets off the table while casually putting my foot over her phone and sliding it towards me. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s alright,” she said. “Let me just…”

She took the two tablets I handed her and rushed over to the bar. I scooped up the fallen phone and then stood, affecting an air of embarrassed helplessness while I positioned my body so that the tall chair was between me and her.

She had grabbed a handful of towels and was desperately mopping up the mess. I held her phone low and close to my waist and checked out the recently dialed number. When I tapped the number I was given a full contact listing.

The name Tamara, a number that wasn’t any of the numbers Mickey had given me, and the words Wilcox Apt. I tried to commit the number to memory, then exited out of the contact and pretended to be wiping the screen off against my shirt.

“You dropped your phone,” I said, handing it over.

“Thank you,” she said, distracted as she pocketed the phone. “It’s no problem, really. I’ll just get this taken care of here.”

While she finished cleaning up the mess, I pulled my notebook out of my back pocket and wrote down Angie’s new phone number.

“Well,” she said. “I’m sorry for the delay with Tamara. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try one of our other models?”

I shook my head.

“She’s perfect,” I said. “I don’t mind waiting.”

“All right, just leave your contact information with Zoë at the front desk, and I’ll have her call you as soon as we are able to set up an appointment.”

“Thanks,” I said, suddenly thinking again about the receptionist. Zoë. I wouldn’t mind setting up an appointment with her. “Sorry about the mess.”

She extended that bony hand again. I shook it.

“No problem at all,” she said. “We’ll be in touch.”

She let me back out into the receptionist area and shut the door behind me. I walked over to Zoë’s desk and smiled at her.

“I’m heading over to the Wilcox apartment for a shoot,” I told her. “What was the cross street again?”

“Between Hollywood and Franklin,” she said. “It’s called The Crestview. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you, Zoë,” I said.

I turned away before I could see the look on her face, but I could feel her not-watching me as I walked out the door.

8.

I knew The Crestview. It was one of those huge, dorm-like apartment complexes that serve as landing pads for the hopeful, interchangeable twentysomethings who bounce in and out of Hollywood by the busload on a daily basis. Month-to-month leases, real high turnover. The kind of place where no one would care about a bunch of unfamiliar faces coming and going. Very smart choice on Vivian’s part.

When I turned off Hollywood Boulevard and onto Wilcox, I was thinking of how I was going to get in to the building. Figuring how best to determine which apartment was Angie’s trick pad and wondering what name might be on the buzzer. Working the angles, running through that comfortable, constant Rubik’s cube process that goes on in my head nearly every waking hour of every day. I do it when I’m supposed to be off-duty. I do it when it I really should be minding my own business. I can’t help it. Cowboys ride horses. I do this.

Lost as I was in my internal figuring, it took my brain a second to process what my eyes were seeing. Police prowlers blocking the street in front of the Crestview. No wailing ambulance, just the silent, solemn coroner’s van with all the time in the world to wait for a pick-up. My stomach twisted, heart like a brick in my chest as I pulled into a miraculously vacant parking spot a few doors down from the action.

I got out of my car just as the stiff came rolling out through the double glass doors, ferried by a pair of grim techs. Anonymous and neatly bagged, like trash.

“Jesus,” I said, stepping up to the handsome Robocop guarding my end of the taped-off scene. “Tell me that’s not Angie Bedrosyan.”

“Sir,” he replied, like he was telling a dog to sit. “I’m going to have to ask you to step back.”

He looked down at my tits, then back up to my face. His expression turned hard. He didn’t apologize for his mistake. I was about to make a snarky comment about diversity training when a familiar voice made me turn towards a familiar face.

“Butch Fatale?”

When I knew Officer Gilberto Obregon he was a lanky, over-eager rookie whose sparse, pitiful attempt at a mustache was the butt of endless jokes around the station. In the years since I’d last seen him, his mustache had filled out and so had he. Thick muscle bulged beneath his Kevlar, and there were sergeant’s stripes on his tight uniform sleeve, but his big goofy smile hadn’t changed.

“Sergeant, eh?” I shook his offered hand. “You always were the best ass-kisser in your class.”

“Yeah, well that raise buys an awful lot of Chapstick.” His grip was warm, firm but not aggressively so.  “What are you doing here? “

“Looking for a call girl named Angie Bedrosyan,” I told him, trying not to watch the techs load the stiff into the van.

His smile clouded over. “You knew the deceased?”

Shit. I knew it.

“Never met her,” I told him, fighting to keeping my voice from cracking. “I was hired to find her. I guess I just did.” I looked back at the van as it pulled away from the curb, taking what was left of my job away with it.  “What’s the C.O.D?”

“Initial evaluation of the scene suggests a probable overdose,” he replied, reverting to the official, objectifying cop-speak that makes it easier to talk about the dead.

“Come on, Beto,” I said. “Can’t you give me any more than that?”

“She had a needle hanging out of her left arm,” he said, lowering his voice and casting an anxious eye towards the scowling Robocop. “So unless toxicology comes back with some kind of crazy curveball, it’s a no-brainer. No forced entry, no sign of a struggle. It might have been a fuck-up, or maybe it was deliberate. Either way, she’s just as dead. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.” I shook my head. “Sorry, but not surprised.”

I filled him in on what I knew, and he listened with a sad, thoughtful expression. It seemed amazing that he’d made sergeant yet still somehow retained the ability to give a fuck about someone like Angie. It couldn’t possibly last.

“I’ll need you to come down to the station and give a statement,” he said.

“I figured,” I said. No way around it, really.

There went my evening.

* * *

It didn’t take as long as I expected. Even after all those years, I’m still fluent in cop-speak and can handle that kind of paperwork in my sleep. Anyway, it was just a formality. Confirmation of what they already knew. When Beto was done with me, he put a comforting hand on my shoulder.

“It’s good to see you again, Fatale,” he told me. “You should come by for dinner one of these nights. Lindy’d love to have you.”

“Lindy?” I frowned. “Not Lindy Haurbach?”

He grinned.

“We’ve been married three years now,” he said. “Two boys, twins.”

He pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of beaming Lindy with two pink, crinkled-faced infants in matching miniature Dodger uniforms. I figured it would be a bad idea to tell him about the time I’d fucked Lindy in the station house shower and made her come so hard that she ripped the hot water handle off the spigot. We had to use a wrench to turn on the hot water for months after that.

“Congratulations,” I said instead, handing the phone back to him.

“Thanks,” he said. “Can I give you a lift back to your car?”

“Nah,” I smirked and shook my head. “I got it. You know you’re really way too nice for this racket.”

He frowned with his eyebrows and smiled with his lips at the same time, looking at me like I was out of my mind.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Never mind,” I said, giving him a playful punch in the beefy arm. “Anyway, I’ll see you later.”

I needed to talk to Penny, to catch her up on what had gone down, so I called her from the street outside the station and asked if she could swing by and pick me up. Told her I’d fill her in on the way back to Wilcox.

She arrived in minutes, like she’d been waiting just around the corner. When she pulled up in her sensible little Honda Civic with the “Reading is Sexy” bumper sticker, I was embarrassed by how glad I was to see her.

I got in. Penny’s car is always neat and spotless and smells just like she does, like foxed paper and the jasmine tea she drinks and her subtle, smoky perfume. I always have to scoot the seat back to accommodate my long legs, and it makes me wonder who else besides me has been riding in her shotgun seat. Not that it’s any of my business, and not like I have any right to be jealous with the way I spread it around, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering.

She had changed out of her usual strict, buttoned-up librarian duds and was wearing a thin black v-neck t-shirt and stretchy leggings that made me sorry she was sitting down. Her long hair was freshly washed and still slightly damp, twisted up in a messy, careless knot. No make-up, but she didn’t need it. She looked the way I imagined she might look if you woke up next to her. She tipped her chin in my direction.

“Belt, please.”

I put on my seat belt.

“So?” she said, pulling out into traffic.

“So Angie’s dead,” I said. “O.D.”

“Damn.” She took her right hand off the wheel and put it on top of my left, giving it a gentle squeeze while running her thumb over the back of my hand. “I’m sorry, Butch.”

Her touch felt so simple and good after so much pointless ugliness that I suddenly felt all the emotion I’d been keeping in check welling up like blood behind my clenched teeth. I couldn’t let myself go to pieces in front of Penny, so I took my hand away and ran it through my hair.

“Yeah, well,” I said, looking away out the window. “Shit happens.”

She looked at me for a fleeting second, searching my face before turning her eyes back to the road with a barely perceivable nod. Graciously letting me hang on to my tough-guy routine, no matter how transparent.

“Sure does,” she said.

Neither one of us said anything else for a few minutes.

“Guess I won’t bother typing up a report on my chat with her family,” Penny finally said, making the turn onto Wilcox and pulling up behind my car. “Not much to report anyway. Parents were a brick wall. Acted like she was dead already. But her younger sister, Vika, hinted that she might know where Angie was staying. I thought she’d be worth leaning on, if we could get her outside the sphere of mom and dad’s influence.” She shrugged. “No point now.”

I unfastened my seatbelt and got out of the car, looking up at the generic apartment complex where Angie’s life had ended.

 “Thanks,” I told Penny through the open passenger-side window, thanking her for so much more than just the lift.

“Anytime,” she replied, holding my gaze long enough to show me that she meant so much more than just the lift. Then she glanced over at my car. “You have a ticket.”

“Shit,” I said, rolling my eyes and snatching the little envelope off my windshield. With everything else going on, I’d completely forgotten about the parking meter. “That just fucking figures.”

“Give it here,” she said, hand out. “I’ll take care of it.”

I handed it over.

“Thanks,” I said again. Amazing how utterly inadequate that little word can be.

“See you tomorrow,” she said, pocketing the ticket and pulling away from the curb.

I watched her tail lights until she turned down Franklin. What the hell would I do without that kid?

I had been irritated by the prospect of being stuck at the station for so long, but now that it was all over, I was left alone with a head full of dark thoughts. Nothing standing between me and what came next.

I had to tell Mickey that Angie was dead.

What happened to Angie was open and shut. Just another drug casualty, buried in the files. Forgotten, along with all the other lost women just like her. As sympathetic as Beto had been, he saw no need for further investigation. There’d be no reason for anyone official to talk to Mickey. After all, she wasn’t “family.” So Beto would go break the bad news to the parents who had disowned Angie for being herself, and then he would move on to the next case.

I’d taken and spent Mickey’s money, so I felt like I owed her the answer she paid for. But that didn’t make it any easier.

9.

Choux was hopping that night. It would have been any night, being the pet project of a celebrity chef, the fearsome Marcheline Lefevre. Lefevre was one of the few female chefs in L.A. to earn two Michelin stars, but was best known for allegedly chasing her girlfriend, an up-until-that-point closeted power agent, down Rodeo Drive with a cleaver.

The room was spare and ultra-modern but livened up with quirky touches like ornamental cabbages instead of flowers and whimsical, intentionally mismatched silverware. The daily menu had been handwritten on the dark blue wall with chalk. Every table was taken. Mostly twosomes making goo-goo eyes over escargot sliders and truffled mac and cheese, but there was one big, boisterous table of ten in the back. A vapid rom-com star named Heather Linwood and her button-eyed entourage. Heather was hanging all over a grinning steroid-ape who was not her brand new director husband. They had just been served drinks and appetizers. Pulling a key cook off the line right now would put the kitchen so deep in the weeds they’d never recover, but standing there waiting felt like holding a Buick over my head.

The Victoria’s Secret reject hostess sat me at the bar, where I nursed a fancy, small-batch bourbon that cost more than my car and tried to figure out what the hell I was going to do. Heather kept fussing over the fat content of everything on the menu and sending the waiter away over and over because she needed more time to decide what to order and not eat. It made me want to punch her in the empty, Pilates-sculpted stomach. Finally, I had an idea.

I stepped outside and made a quick call to a particularly voracious paparazzo with the amusingly inappropriate name of Benny Noble. Benny’s this deceptively cute little twink, just twenty-two and already a seasoned Tinseltown predator. In addition to his guerilla photography, he also runs a catty gossip website. He’d just posted a raunchy tell-all by a Filipino rent-boy who claimed to have been paid to piss on Heather Linwood’s new husband during their honeymoon in Aspen. I figured some candid shots of Heather and her beefy, extracurricular chew-toy would make a nice follow up.

Benny crashed Heather’s party like the Red Death just ten minutes later, snapping away and screaming her name while the hangers-on scattered like roaches. In her haste to disentangle herself from her side-dish, she tripped over her own spike-heeled Giuseppe Zanotte booties and somehow managed to twist her tight skirt all the way up to her waist. She was not wearing panties. Benny’s squeal of delight at this bonus beaver shot was so high pitched that it was only audible to dogs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gay man so happy to see a vagina.

Heather’s handlers scooped her up off the floor and hustled her out the back door, throwing money at the smirking hostess. Benny mouthed the words I love you to me as he was dragged away by security. I gave the dust a few minutes to settle, steeling myself with the remains of my pricy bourbon and then headed reluctantly back into the kitchen.

The Choux kitchen was a miracle of controlled chaos. Like watching army ants slaughter and dismember a grasshopper a hundred times their size. Nearly everyone was Latino, variously accented Spanish swearing and smack-talk flying along with knives and dirty pans. And there was Mickey in the middle of it all. Silent and pokerfaced, working the line with the deadly, efficient grace of a martial artist. Kitchen-kata.

 The volatile rock-star chef herself was nowhere to be seen. The only person on the crew who was Caucasian was a heavy-set woman with a face like a sunburned bulldog who played the role of whipcracking overseer, expediting the orders.

“Au poivre, medium,” she barked. “Moules, moules, téte de veau.”  She waved a fistful of crumpled tickets. “And where’s my fucking confit?”

“Confit up,” Mickey replied.

She dumped the fragrant contents of her pan onto a plate, slid it across a steel table to the red-faced woman, tossed the still-sizzling pan across the room into a bin full of other dirty pans, and replaced it with a clean one from the rack above her head. All with that same smooth, effortless economy of movement. Then she looked up and saw me.

Her eyes lit up, bright and hopeful for a fleeting second. It felt like a knife in the gut. I gestured with my chin for her to come talk to me, and my expression must have told her the news wasn’t good. Her face went cold, knuckles white where she gripped the handle of the pan. She let the hot metal sear her scarred fingers for a good twenty seconds before finally letting it go and backing away from the stove.

“Hernandez,” the overseer said. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Mickey didn’t reply, but I could see it register on the bossy woman’s jowly face that something was seriously wrong. She frowned, squinting through the steam from the plate of hot duck confit in her hand.

“Nava!” she called, cocking her head towards the smoking pan that had been abandoned by Mickey. “Sauté.”

One of the other cooks stepped up to take over Mickey’s station. He was a hulking, tattooed thug that most of the white diners at Choux would probably cross the street to avoid. I remembered his name from my first meeting with Mickey. This was obviously Chuy, the friend who had seen Angie buying meth. He could tell something was wrong too and gave Mickey a sympathetic nod that she did not return. She just walked over to me like a condemned prisoner headed for the needle.

“Outside,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

I followed her through a narrow corridor lined with produce crates and olive oil cans and out through a heavy mesh security door into the alley behind the restaurant.

There was no easy way to say what I had to say, so I just said it.

“Angie’s dead. Overdose.”

Mickey took a half a step back and clenched her burned hand into a shaking fist, expressionless except for a slight tick in the hinge of her jaw. A soft Spanish whisper slipped between her clenched teeth and her eyes narrowed to glistening slits. Her acne-scarred cheeks went flushed and blotchy, and she turned her face away, shoulders trembling beneath her stained whites.

I knew there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could say that would do anything but make it worse, so I kept my trap shut.

She stood there for an endless minute, as if bracing herself against an invisible storm, then slammed her fist into the rough brick a half a dozen times in quick succession. I stepped up behind her and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her away from the wall.

“Hey now,” I said. “Knock it off, willya? You can’t cook with a broken hand.”

She wrenched herself free from my grasp and spun to face me, cocking back that bleeding fist like she was gonna take a swing. But she didn’t. She opened her clenched hand and looked at it like it belonged to someone else. Then she squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her back against the wall, sliding slowly down to a sitting position and covering her face with both hands.

She broke down and cried then, every razor-wire sob wrenched out of her against her will, as if with pliers. It hurt to watch.

I turned away from her raw, ugly grief out of respect. Knowing I would want that same respect if it were me. I tried to find something else to look at in the narrow alley, but there wasn’t much. A locked dumpster. A wet, swollen copy of LA Weekly. Some kind of lanky yellow weed that was trying to grow in a crack in the cement. And at the far end, a quiet, residential side street with no traffic.

When Mickey’s tears had run their course, she said something I wasn’t expecting. A question that seemed so odd at first that I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“You can get me in, right?” she asked.

I turned back to her, frowning.

“In where?” I asked eventually. 

“You can get me in to see her,” she said. “To say goodbye.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Hold on a second. I mean… Christ, I don’t know…”

“Come on, man,” she said. Her face was stone but her eyes were like open wounds. “You know her fucking family won’t let me near the funeral.”

How could I say no? I nodded.

“I’ll make some calls.”

10.

There was really only one call I needed to make. Brink.

She met us at the Jack in the Box across the street from the L.A. County Coroner. It’s downtown, just off the 5 freeway in the middle of a whole lot of industrial nothing. Not surprising, since no one wants all those dead people in their neighborhood. It’s totally unlike anything else in the immediate area, this gorgeous, gloomy brick building that seems to have been created by set designers for a director who was hoping to get laid by goth chicks. If it were my movie, I might have told them to tone it down a bit and try to come up with something a little more realistic.

Brink was dressed in her same standard-issue unflattering polyester cop suit, shield on a ball-chain around her thick neck. Mickey, with her blood-stained chef’s whites and gang tattoos, looked like she should be in Brink’s handcuffs.

“Mickey Hernandez,” I said. “Detective Brink Bannon.”

Brink went to shake Mickey’s damaged hand, but held back when she saw the bruises, scabs and blisters. She gave a curt nod instead. Mickey and Brink couldn’t be more different, polar opposites in every way but one. The only one that mattered that night. There was no need to explain. We just did what needed to be done.

Brink badged us in to the building. I was pretty sure I heard the not-really-whispered words “Three Butchketeers” from the pair of smart-asses working the desk, but chose to ignore it. We made our way through several long hallways and then endured a silent elevator ride down to the morgue.

Pretty building notwithstanding, there’s no getting around the smell. You never forget the smell of the morgue. The strident floral disinfectant and harsh chemical aromas hit you first, a flashy pay-no-attention-to-that-smell-behind-the-curtain kind of olfactory distraction. But that other smell is there, defiant and unmistakable. A meaty, stomach-turning bass note, like summer garbage or vomit or spoiled milk but really nothing like any of those things. Because it smells like exactly what it is.

I watched the stink hit Mickey as soon as the elevator doors opened. She no-sold it pretty well, but I knew it was about so much more for her than just an unpleasant odor. It was knowing that her girl was here, inexorably contributing to that smell.

Brink turned us over to a chubby black queen with no eyebrows and long, relaxed hair slicked back into a tight ponytail. There were stains on his baggy scrubs that I didn’t want to think about. He seemed to already know who we were and why we were there.

“I’m so sorry, sugar,” he told Mickey, giving her arm a maternal pat. “You take as much time as you need with her.”

He opened a heavy door and gestured for Mickey to go ahead in. Inside was a wheeled steel stretcher that looked like the sort of thing used to ferry patients into surgery, except it lacked any comfortable padding or safety rails. Comfort and safety were no longer issues down here.

And there, laid out on that bare uncomfortable steel with her head propped up by a wooden block, was Angie.

A white sheet had been draped over her and then folded down, exposing her face and shoulders, but keeping her legendary breasts modestly covered. She had yet to be embalmed or cosmetically enhanced by the clever hand of a mortician. Her long black hair was tangled, her dull, sticky eyes neither fully closed nor completely open. Everything that had made her seem radiant and beautiful in life was gone, leaving behind nothing but pale, ugly clay. Average features, thin dry lips and that just-a-little-too-big nose. It seemed horribly unfair that this was the first and only time I would ever see her in the flesh.

Mickey reached out to touch Angie’s face, then pulled back. She looked over her shoulder at me, a thousand conflicting emotions at war in her tortured eyes.

“Can I…” She looked back at the corspe that used to be Angie. “Do you mind? I need a minute. Alone…”

“Of course,” I said.

To tell the truth, I was glad to get the hell out of there.

The chubby queen turned out to be named Desmond, from New Orleans originally, and in the middle of a nasty break-up with his anesthesiologist boyfriend. The boyfriend was named Mark and had a big dick, but was self-centered and insensitive to Desmond’s emotional needs. I was happy for the distraction, and encouraged him to keep talking. He was happy to oblige.

“So I told him,” Desmond said. “I ain’t no drive-through ATM where you can make a quick deposit on your way to the motherfucking golf course…”

He trailed off when he noticed Mickey standing in the doorway holding an open file.

 “Heroin?” Mickey said. She looked up at me, frowning. “Is this right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“When you said OD, I thought…” She shook her head and looked down at the paperwork in her hand.

“You know what,” Desmond said, shoulders pinched and uncomfortable as he pointed down the hall. “I’d better… Well… Y’all can find your own way out, right?”

“Sure,’ I said. “Thanks.”

Mickey was still looking at the toxicology report, still frowning. She barely seemed to notice Desmond’s hasty departure.

“Angie was an upper kind of girl, you know?” she said. “This? This is just… wrong.” Her grip on the report tightened. “She never liked that shit before, so why do it now?”

“Maybe because she wanted to die,” I said softly.

A heroin overdose is no picnic, but I’d take that over a meth overdose any day of the week. After all, if you wanted to check out for good, would you rather lose consciousness while your breathing and heart-rate get slower and slower until they stop, or have your heart jitterbug itself to death like a baby alien that can’t figure out how to bust out of your chest?

“No,” Mickey said. “I know her, and this isn’t right. Something just isn’t right. It’s not right.”

I felt for her, but I knew she was just spinning her wheels at that point. Grasping at straws, desperate for answers. Anything to protect her grieving heart from the painful truth that no matter how much you love someone, you can never really know what goes on inside that person’s head.

“You need to help me find out why this happened,” Mickey said, gripping my arm way too hard. “Why was she tricking again in the first place? What happened to her that would make her do this?” She shook the report. “You can find out, right? You can find out the truth.”

The truth. Right. I’m in the business of selling the truth and I’m here to tell you that in all my years as a P.I, the kind of truth people buy from me has rarely made anybody happy. But who was I to tell Mickey what she did or didn’t want to know?

“I can pay,” Mickey began but I cut her off, showing her my palms.

“Come on now,” I told her. “You already paid me for three days, so you’ve still got two more coming. Let me see what I can dig up, okay?”

“Thanks,” Mickey said.

I took the file from her hand and set it back in the plastic pocket attached to Angie’s stretcher. I tried not to look at Angie’s slack, empty face as I pulled the sheet up over her head.

“Can I give you ride somewhere?” I asked Mickey. “Back to the restaurant, or home?”

“Actually,” Mickey said. “What I really want to do right now is go slam some fucking crystal.” She ran a shaking hand over the back of her stubbled neck. “So I think you’d better drop me at my sponsor’s place instead.”

“You got it,” I told her.

After I dropped Mickey off at one of those huge, ultra-modern loft complexes that seem to be elbowing out all the cool old buildings along Wilshire Boulevard, I tried to figure out what to do with myself.

I was feeling low, drained by the whole nasty business. I looked down at my phone and thought about calling Penny. Thought about the way she’d run her thumb over the back of my hand. But I knew getting involved with her was still a bad idea no matter how good it might feel, so I pointed the Fury’s battered nose northward and headed into Hollywood.

11.

The Wiggle Room is a girly bar down Ivar. It’s been in and out of fashion more times than a stripper on Saturday night. It used to be a hot spot for slumming Hollywood royalty back in the Ratpack era. The ‘70s brought swingers and blow and prostitution charges. It got closed down after a suspicious death that may or may not have been murder, then was reopened in the big-hair eighties by the bassist of Wild Cherry as a place for his broke-ass musician friends to drink for free and pick up meal-ticket girlfriends. Grunge came along and pissed on that parade, and the Wiggle Room stayed dormant for nearly a decade. There were a few half-assed attempts to take over the space and make it into a sports bar or a Casablanca-themed tourist trap. They all failed. Until Mina Levy bought the place in 1999. Mina was the reason I was there.

Mina’s husband, Zane, was out front smoking a cigarette and talking the ear off the enormous black bouncer. The big man endured this verbal onslaught with the pained, grimly professional expression of a bodyguard who has just noticed that his celebrity pop-diva client farted in the limo.

Zane is tall, thin and stoop-shouldered with a wispy ponytail and the gray, lifeless complexion of someone who spends too much time in front of a computer screen. Whip-smart and deeply sardonic, he gives off that distinct alpha-geek vibe I tend to associate with straight, younger Doms in the BDSM scene. The kind of guy who’s used to being the best-looking male at Klingon camp. A Ren Faire kind of guy. I used to hate him, back when I was a cocky little baby-butch determined to steal Mina away from him. I still don’t really understand the whole kinky polyamory thing those two have going, but I’ve long since made my peace with Zane.

“Butch Fucking Fatale,” he said when he spotted me. “How’s it hanging?”

“To my fucking knees,” I replied, trying for a smile. “How about you?”

“Hey,” Zane frowned slightly, genuine concern in his eyes. “You okay?”

So much for the Teflon tough-guy routine.

“Been a rough day,” I admitted, hoping he’d let it go at that.

“Mama’s behind the bar,” he told me, hand on my shoulder. “She’ll set you right.”

He turned to the bouncer and tipped his head in my direction.

“She’s good.”

The bouncer silently moved aside to let me in.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Mi pussy es tu pussy,” Zane said with a smirk and a campy wink.

I laughed and shook my head. Zane’s really not a bad guy, but he has this amazing ability to temper every thoughtful, decent thing he’s ever done with something that makes you want to kick him in the nuts.

Inside, the Wiggle Room had been fully restored to its flashy, Ratpack glory, but filtered through Mina’s own quirky, alternative, indy-goth sensibility. Like a time-traveler had stepped on a butterfly somewhere in the distant past and now all the chicks in 1963 had Crayola hair and nipple rings.

To my left was a luscious, dark-skinned honey in a white bouffant wig and aqua sparkle lipstick that matched her g-string. To the right, a bodacious BBW with hair like hot-rod flames and ruffled red Rumba panties. All the women were quirky and unusual. Probably not particularly appealing to the average Joe Flyover kind of guy looking for blonde, implanted Pam Anderson knock-offs, but tailor-made for someone like me. On that night, despite all the gyrating female flesh around me, I only had eyes for Mina.

And there she was, behind the bar just like Zane said she would be.

Mina’s in the homestretch of her 40s now, and still a knock-out. Built like Sophia Loren, with a waist the size of my watchband and a wild head of corkscrewed auburn curls, but the real beauty is in her eyes. Dark eyes full of wisdom and gentle humor. She’s like the warm, nurturing Jewish mom I never had. But, you know, hot. 

 I was pretty crazy about her once. Still kind of am, I guess, even though I have no interest in becoming a team-player in her pansexual poly-family. She likes to say that her heart’s too big for just one lover, and she’s not lying. She collects lost boys and girls like some people rescue stray cats. Zane is what she calls her “primary”, but she’s always got a half a dozen other regular lovers and twice that many occasional drop-ins like me. She’s like the life-giving star in the center of her own little solar system. A comforting hearth that everyone gathers around to warm their hands. And I’m here to tell you, my hands were pretty fucking cold that night.

“Butch,” she said when she saw me, smiling that slow familiar smile and reaching across the bar to take my face between her palms. “Let me look at you.”

“You look better every time I see you, baby,” I told her.

“You look like you could use a drink,” she replied, setting me up with a shot of whisky without breaking eye contact. “Now why don’t you tell Mama all about it?”

I did, and she kept the whiskey coming, silent and sympathetic. When I had let it all out, she came around the bar and put a hand on the small of my back.

“Come on,” she said.

She didn’t have to ask twice.

Mina and Zane keep an airplane hangar-sized loft above the Wiggle Room that’s part fuckpad and part way-station for homeless hotties. It’s divided into convoluted, ant-farm sections by overstuffed bookshelves, vintage sideshow banners, and burbling fish tanks full of pretty, dangerous creatures. The only illumination is provided by tangled strings of tiny colored lights and the bluish, wavering, underwater glow from the tanks.

She brought me up to the loft and led me through the maze to a massive, tennis-court-sized bed. A dozen long, fluttering strips of colored silk hung like upside down kelp from the mile-high ceiling above. The bed was covered in ragged scraps of sheer, glittery fabric like the aftermath of a cat-fight between belly dancers and was currently occupied by a pair of pretty young gendernauts.

They were similar as siblings. Matching silver glitter wigs and dressed alike in ironically hideous teal spandex ‘80’s bodysuits and magenta legwarmers. No make-up except for curly, Snidely Whiplash mustaches drawn on with eyeliner. One was reading a Kindle and the other listening to music through ear-bud headphones shaped like little pink pig noses.

“Vamoose, you two,” Mina said, plucking a pig nose out of one’s ear and slapping the other’s ass.

They giggled in tandem, then vamoosed, leaving behind a lingering cloud of cupcake perfume.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and opened my arms.

“Come here, beautiful,” I said.

Mina straddled my legs and sat on my lap, pulling her tight Wiggle Room t-shirt up over her head and revealing an industrial-strength black bullet bra that was barely up to the task of containing all that woman. I swiftly relieved it of its duty and tossed it aside.

I held her close and buried my face between her breasts, breathing her warm, musky scent and feeling her heartbeat against my flushed cheek. I ran my palms up over her padded ribs and hefted a heavy tit in each hand, teasing the stiffening nipples first with my thumbs and then my tongue. She ran her long nails through my hair, sending an army of shivers down my back. Then she tipped my face up to hers and kissed me.

That kiss was just what I needed. Her warmth, her taste, her soft body and the wild springy excess of her hair in my fists. I could feel all my muscles uncoiling beneath her touch. The rest of my day ceased to matter.

She broke the kiss and looked down at me, lips curling in the corners and nimble fingers making short work of my buttons.

“Lay down, baby,” she said.

“Aw, come on Mina, you don’t have to do that,” I began, but she was having none of it. I’d learned long ago that it was better just to let her have her way.

I did like she wanted, stripped down and stretched out on my stomach. She oiled up her hands with some kind of herbal, hippie-smelling unguent and went to work.

“I love your shoulders,” she purred in my upturned ear, nipples brushing lightly against my back as she dug her thumbs into my steely trapezius muscles. “But that’s where you carry all your tension.”

If I wasn’t already Jell-O before that, I was by then. Mina rubbed me down and worked me over, slick fingers slipping between the cheeks of my ass and into my cunt. She teased me and caressed me and fucked me slowly with two fingers until I came, twisting fistfuls of gaudy fabric and pressing my face into a heap of fragrant pillows.

I did something then that I’d never done before or since. I supposed I could blame the whisky or the soporific comfort of Mina’s embrace, but whatever the reason, as soon as I came, I fell asleep like I’d been roofied. I know Mina loves me and is always willing to cut me slack, but I still feel kinda bad about leaving her hanging that.

12.

I woke up alone, feeling a little hung over but not too shabby. I’d slept better than I had in weeks. I wished I could have said goodbye to Mina, maybe even given her a little payback for her generosity the night before, but she was long gone. No doubt off to rescue another stray.

There were no visible windows in Mina’s lair, so it was impossible to tell if it was noon or midnight, but I could see my watch sitting on the little gilded table by the bed. I went to reach for it when I was startled by a flash of movement above my head. I sat up way too fast, sweaty sheet clutched against my chest, and looked up.

Clinging like a spider to the top of one of the strips of colored silk, was a girl.

She had a sinewy, fine-boned build and a flat chest. Probably 99 pounds soaking wet. Her bright red hair was cut pixie-short and she was naked except for a pair of unremarkable heathered-gray cotton panties. She was also upside-down, strong legs spread in a wide V, with the silk strip wrapped around her tiny waist. She looked down at me and smiled.

“Hi,” she said, like the circumstances of our meeting were as unremarkable as her panties. She twisted herself slowly upright, right leg twining with the silk. “I’m Lark.”

“Butch,” I told her, unable to take my eyes off her mesmerizing aerial ballet.

“Sorry if I woke you,” she said, fluidly shifting to another, even more provocative position. “I’m just practicing my new routine.”

She suddenly let go of the silk with both hands and came spinning down towards me like a yoyo, terrifyingly fast, stopping at the last possible second with her muscular little ass just inches above my upturned face.

“What do you think?” she asked, twisting again so that the silk dug deep between her legs, clearly delineating the shape of her outer labia through the thin gray panties.

I had all kinds of thoughts about her show, but I also had a job to do. I’d made a promise to Mickey, and intended to keep that promise.

“Fantastic,” I told her, sliding out from under her suspended body and grabbing my tangled jeans. “When’s your next performance?”

“Friday,” she said. “Every Friday at 10:15. My stage name is Arielle.”

“Arielle,” I repeated, kind of surprised that someone named Lark would need a stage name. “I’ll be there.”

I got my feet into my shoes and my arms into my shirt, buckling my watch around my wrist while I watched her undulate her way back up to the top of the silk strip.

“Tell Mina I owe her one,” I said over my shoulder as I turned to leave.

“We all do,” Lark replied.

* * *

I grabbed a bucket of awful black coffee from the 7-Eleven on Sunset and Las Palmas and headed back over the Crestview to see if there was anything left behind at the scene that might give me some insight into Angie’s last hours.

I checked the intercom by the double doors and found a V. Lane on the list of tenants. Apartment 404. I rang the office buzzer instead and was greeted by a perky blonde fembot in knock-off Versace glasses and a painted-on trouser suit. I didn’t even need to give her a cover story about looking to rent an apartment. She just went into her carefully memorized spiel about luxurious Hollywood living at affordable prices, like I’d pushed the button on a museum diorama.

“Would you be interested in a studio, one-bedroom, or one of our unique bi-level loft suites?”

I didn’t bother to tell her that if there were more than one of these “bi-level loft suites” then by definition, they couldn’t possibly be “unique.” I didn’t want to screw up her script.

“Do you have anything available on the fourth floor?” I asked.

She went blank for a second, like she was retrieving the answer to my question off a sluggish hard drive. Then her perkiness turned to big-eyed Keene-painting sadness.

“I’m afraid not,” she said, as if personally heartbroken by this terrible news. “But there are several vacancies on three, including a very desirable corner unit with a balcony.”

I let her show me a couple of apartments. They were all depressingly generic and claustrophobic, like airport hotel rooms. I was starting to develop a nasty headache, but it was hard to tell if it was caused by the perky desperation coming off the blonde or the toxic off-gassing of the cheap beige carpet.

I finally gave her the brush off and told her I could find my own way out. When she was out of sight, I went up the stairs rather than down.

404 was on the left side of the hallway. Nothing about it made it stand out. No welcome mat, no personal touches. It was just another door. The lock was Mickey Mouse, and it was no sweat to let myself in.

On the inside Vivian’s trick pad was an amazingly realistic simulation of a young woman’s apartment. Like a photo spread for Urban Outfitters. It was all one room with a narrow kitchenette against one wall and a cubbyhole of a bathroom on the other. A low modern sofa with too many whimsically sequined throw pillows. Ikea coffee table with nothing on it except a book of funny cat photos that looked like it had never been opened. Cheerful pink curtains and kitschy painting of a frisky fawn leaping over the words “OH MY DEER!” The bed was the center of everything, covered by a cute, girly comforter. Pink like the curtains, with a pattern of loopy, scribbled daisies. This was not the sexy sin pit of some man-eating siren. This was a nice girl’s apartment. I’d already nominated Vivian for an award in matchmaking, but seeing this joint made me want to nominate her for best set design too.

The creepy thing about this apartment was exactly that. It was a set. The fridge was stocked like a hotel mini-bar. No milk, just a basket of single-serving half-and-half containers for coffee. No bread or eggs, just pre-packaged, upscale snacks like chocolate oranges and fancy whole-grain crackers. Mostly it was full of drinks, good beer and booze and various mixers. Plenty of ice.

The bathroom was more of the same. Pin-neat and nothing but travel sized bottles of chi-chi organic toiletries. Closet and dresser, empty. Bedside drawer, just condoms and lube. If there had ever been anything left of the real Angie in this room, it had been swiftly scrubbed away by Vivian’s elves, just like they had scrubbed away any unpleasant stains that might have been left behind by her dying body. And even creepier, I knew that Vivian wouldn’t waste any time installing another nice girl in this apartment. It was as if Angie had never existed.

Hanging around inside that place was getting me nowhere but depressed. I decided to try some old-school door-to-door action and see what the neighbors had to say.

Five no-answers before I got a live one. An anxious, birdy little creature who looked like a brunette Twiggy but sounded like Fran Drescher with a head cold. She informed me that what went on in 404 was disgusting and pathetic, and that she herself, being a legitimate actress who’d studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute, would never stoop so low. Methinks the lady doth protest too much, but hey, whatever you have to tell yourself to make it okay. Her neighbor was infinitely more useful.

He claimed his name was Beeker, an affable stoner with a Lucky Charms t-shirt and ironic plaid golf-pants. His apartment reeked of bong water and Cheese Doodles, and I politely declined his offer to come inside.

He remembered Angie quite vividly and claimed she had a “hot blonde friend” with “even more ginormous titties” who had visited her on a regular basis over the past few days.

“I bet they were totally…” he began, then, realizing who he was talking to, started awkwardly backpedaling. “I mean, like, maybe they were, um… you know, like a couple.”

My first thought was that the hot blonde friend was probably one of Vivian’s other models, coming in for a girl-girl show or threesome gig. But Beeker admitted that he had been listening through the flimsy wall whenever the blonde visited, hoping to hear something sexy. All he’d ever heard was lots of talking, some arguing and, on the day Angie died, sounds that he claimed were “maybe crying.”

Now this was interesting, but more a tease than a revelation. It did seem to line up with Mickey’s claim that there was more going on here than just a garden-variety relapse. I figured my next step was to head back to Vivian’s office and see if I could charm some more detailed info out of the lovely Zoë. Specifically names and contact info for Angie’s most recent dates. It was a long shot, and there was a better than good chance Zoë might tell me to go fuck myself, but even if I got nowhere, it would be infinitely more entertaining than hanging out with Beeker.

13.

I made a quick pit stop back at my EchoPark apartment to shower and put on whatever I had in my closet that might pass for decent clothes. No chance of impressing a girl like Zoë with my kinda duds, but it would probably be a good idea if whatever I was wearing hadn’t already been fucked in more than once.

I knew I really should have been concentrating on the task at hand, but I couldn’t help indulging in a little cyberstalking before heading over to Vivian’s office.

Turned out Zoë Chenier was born Chareen Loomis. The fourth of six kids. Parents a pair of L.A. bus drivers who met on the job and were apparently still happily married. The only remarkable thing about her childhood was how utterly unremarkable it was. Moderately religious, stable, drama-free. She went to SusanMillerDorseyHigh School, where she was an A student, but did not go on to college. I guess she’d had it with her unremarkable life, so she shaved off all her relaxed hair and fucked off to Paris.

She did some edgy, high-fashion modeling, including a handful of “tasteful” nudes, and got mixed up with an avant-garde filmmaker named Philippe Richard. He shot thousands of hours of gorgeous but excruciatingly boring footage of Zoë doing things like walking through paint or laying in a tub full of raw meat. Philippe’s wife eventually decided she’d had enough of Zoë, and that was the end of her film career. She came back to Los Angeles and started working for Vivian Lane, first as a model and later moving up to her current position as cast-iron gatekeeper.

Of course, I had an ulterior motive here. I was looking for any hard evidence that she might play for our team. What struck me as strange was that I didn’t find much evidence of her playing for any team. She had clearly been sleeping with Richard, but the relationship seemed weirdly one-way. Her standing there tall and beautiful, ignoring his worshipful gaze. There was no evidence of any serious boyfriends in high school. No unusually close girlfriends either. Her current Facebook profile didn’t list a relationship status. All the candid photos she posted showed Zoë slightly apart from everyone else in the shot. She never had her arm around anyone or leaned in close to anyone when the shutter clicked. If others put their arms around her, she allowed it but remained aloof, like a cat that tolerates your affection while waiting for you to make with the can opener. I was starting to think I might need a can opener to get into Zoë’s panties. Or maybe the Jaws of Life.

But I just couldn’t stop thinking about the look in her eyes when I caught her checking me out. Curious. Hungry. Anything but aloof. I had absolutely no idea what to make of that, but I was dying to find out.

When I arrived back at the Vivian Lane office, there she was behind her pristine glass desk. Legs crossed and perfect posture. Frosty as ever in a mint-green sheath dress and matte silver peep-toe heels. No stockings that day. Her toe nails were painted with a pale, subtly pearlescent sheen that exactly matched the gloss on her voluptuous lips. She didn’t seem all that happy to see me.

“Ms. Fatale,” she said, taking off her glasses, getting up from her desk and coming around to block my path. She was a good four inches taller than me in her heels. “Ms Lane has stepped out of the office for a minute, but…”

“I’m not here to see her,” I said with my most disarming smile.

That threw her for a second, but she recovered quickly. She waved a dismissive hand.

“Look, I don’t know what you think you’re doing here,” she told me, stepping aggressively into my personal space. “But I do know that you lied to me about having an appointment with Tamara in order to find out the location of the studio, and now she’s dead. Maybe it was you who killed her. Maybe I should call the cops.”

“But you won’t,” I said, still smiling and not backing down. I could feel a hot pulse kick in between my legs, triggered by her closeness. “Because you’re too smart for that. You know your boss doesn’t want cops involved in her business. And you know what happened to Angie wasn’t murder. You read the police reports, didn’t you? I’ll bet you did.”

She didn’t deny it. I bulldozed on ahead.

“Because you’re not just a receptionist, are you? You’re a fixer. Vivian’s eyes and ears, right? Nothing happens to these girls that you don’t know about. If there’s a problem, you handle it.”

“Are you going to be a problem?” she asked, perfectly penciled brow arched.

“Look,” I told her. “I’m gonna come clean. You deserve that. I won’t lie to you again.”

“You’re damn right you won’t.” She turned to the side, arms crossed and looking away. “Because you won’t talk to me again. Now get out.”

“I’m a private detective,” I continued, staying close. “Angie’s girlfriend hired me to find out why she ran away from home and got back into this racket. I was hoping to find out more about Angie’s last few days. Maybe get a look at her recent client list.”

“Not gonna happen,” she said, face still turned resolutely away.

“But that’s not only reason I’m here.”

She turned back to me with a skeptical frown.

“What’s the other reason?”

I closed what was left of the distance between us until we were as close as we could be without touching. I could feel heat radiating through the thin fabric of her dress, but her dark eyes were still cold and unyielding. Was I reading her wrong? Indulging in egocentric wishful thinking? About to get slapped? Arrested? Only one way to find out.

“You are,” I said, gaze locked with hers.

“Get out,” she said again, but didn’t look away. Didn’t back away.

I wanted to touch her so bad, but didn’t. I kept my hands tight-fisted at my sides, wondering if her perfect skin felt as luscious and buttery as it looked. She was wearing just a hint of citrusy, almost masculine cologne, and beneath it I could smell the subtle, mysterious tang of her own natural scent. I love the smell of women’s bodies, and I knew that smell that would become stronger and more intoxicating as she got hot and began to sweat. I wanted to be the one to make that happen.

When she spoke again, I could feel her breath on my lips.

“I said. Get. Out.”

Then she kissed me.

That kiss hit me like a truck, knocking me back a step and making me grab her slender waist to keep my balance.

I know you’re wondering if her skin was as soft as I thought it would be. It was softer, if that’s even possible, and there was something strange and wonderful about the tactile combination of such tender, luscious skin stretched taut over her lean, almost bony frame.

“Okay,” she said, looking down at me with hot eyes and smirking lips. “Okay, listen.”

I gripped her firm ass and pulled her closer, my thigh between hers.

“I’m listening,” I said.

“This is just a one-time thing,” she said. “Because you got me in that kind of mood.” She extracted herself from my embrace and locked the office door. “But don’t expect anything out of this.” She turned back to me. “I don’t need a girlfriend.”

“Baby,” I said. “One time with you would be like a lifetime with another woman.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head with a soft laugh.

“You thought that weak-ass line up all by yourself, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, stifling a grin. “And I’ve got plenty more where that came from.”

“Do us both a favor,” she said. “And shut up.”

She grabbed my lapels and kissed me again, harder this time. Her kiss was demanding, aggressive and when she stopped she left me feeling weak and hungry.

I spun her around and pressed my lips to the spot where her long, elegant neck met her broad shoulders. My shaking fingers found the tab on her zipper and slowly pulled it down to her waist. No bra.

I ran my hands over the smooth brown V of her exposed back, then slid them around her waist and up under the warm silk. My fingers found her breasts, nipples hardening under my touch. She purred and let her head drop back against my shoulder.

 I pushed the straps of her dress off her shoulders and it slipped to the carpet, puddled around her high heeled feet. No panties either. Just miles and miles of that flawless bittersweet chocolate skin. She stepped out of the dress, kicked off her shoes and turned to face me, nude and pristine like she just stepped out of one of those tasteful French photographs.

There are some women who are just so impossibly perfect that they almost don’t seem real. Zoë was like that. That uncanny, ectomorphic catwalk build. Firm but natural tits exactly the right size to look feminine without spoiling the lean line of a designer suit. Every feature precisely symmetrical, as if computer generated. Fucking that kind of woman always makes me feel like I just broke into the Louvre. Like I’m getting away with something.

I pulled her back into my arms. Barefoot, she was exactly the same height as me. All of her lip-gloss had been kissed away, but her mouth still glistened, wanting more. I wanted more too.

“Zoë,” I said, sliding my index finger over her lower lip. “Tell me what you like.”

Her dark eyes had fluttered almost shut but opened up again, curious.

“What?”

“I want you…” I kissed her, sucking lightly on that plump lower lip. “To tell me…” I kissed her again. “What you like.” I licked my own lips, tasting her. “Since I only get this one chance to get you off, I don’t want to waste time doing anything other than exactly what you like. So tell me. Tell me what you want me to do to you.”

“Well, I…” She looked away, suddenly self-conscious. “I mean… I don’t know…”

“Yes, you do,” I told her, turning her hot face back to mine. “Show me what you do when you’re alone.”

“Really?”

I smiled.

“Really.”

She disengaged from me and walked slowly back over to her desk, pausing to throw me a nervous glance over one sleek shoulder. Bending over and giving me an eyeful of her high, round ass and skyscraper legs, she pulled a white leather Louis Vuitton handbag from a lower drawer. She opened the bag and took out a little silver pocket rocket.

She shook her head and covered her face with one hand, peeking at me through her fingers and letting out a small, breathless laugh.

“I never showed this to anyone before,” she said.

This sudden, unexpected shyness seemed so endearing, such a dramatic contrast against her stern, chilly work persona. It seemed a shame to get only one crack at unraveling such a fascinating, complex and contradictory woman. But, given the circumstances, I was more than willing to take whatever I could get.

She came back into my arms, pressing her face into my neck and the vibrator into my hand.

“You do it,” she whispered.

I must have had the biggest, goofiest grin on my face at that point, but I didn’t care. I guided her gently to the uncomfortable sofa and sat her down, kneeling between her legs and spreading them open.

Her shaved pussy was stunning. Small and exquisitely detailed, like some outrageously expensive couture creation that I would never be able to afford on a P.I.’s income. But yet there it was, spread open and ready for me. Flushed and glistening, ruffled inner lips shading like a sunrise from deep midnight purple at the edges to hot candy pink at the center.

I thumbed the switch on the vibrator and brushed the head of the humming machine lightly over the hood of her clit.

She sighed and spread her legs a little wider, revealing a tiny cluster of razor bumps on the left side, in the crease between her pussy and her thigh. In a strange way, this minor flaw made her seem even more beautiful to me. More real. It made me picture her in her bathtub just like any ordinary girl, hunched over with those mile-long legs folded up and open, making sure to carefully shave away every little bit of springy black stubble with her pink, disposable razor. That image made me smile. And it made me want her even more. I wanted to make her sweat, make her make funny faces, make her human. To peel back her polished perfection and connect with the real girl underneath. Just this once.

I pressed the vibrator a little harder against her. She raised her hips, gasping.

“Tell me where you like it best,” I said. “Here?” I brushed it against the left side of her clit, about halfway between the tip and the base. “Here?” Same thing, but on the right. “Or here?” I barely touched it to the tiny pink tip protruding from under the dark hood.

She flinched a little, pulling away.

“Ooh, that’s too much,” she said, lip twisted between her teeth.

“Sorry, baby,” I said, leaning in and kissing her shivering clit, unable to resist dipping my tongue down into her slick pussy.

“I like it a little higher up,” she whispered, like someone might be listening. “On the right side.”

She tasted so good, it was hard to take my mouth off her, but I did. I looked down at that gorgeous pussy for a moment, still astounded that I was allowed to see it in the first place. Then I put the vibrator right where she wanted it.

I leaned back a little to watch her face as the powerful sensations washed over her. Her eyes closed, a little crease forming between her eyebrows. Her lips parted, nostrils flaring. She was very quiet, no moaning or swearing, just this intense silence and fast, shallow breath and the sound of her hands clenching and opening and clenching again against the nubbly fabric of the sofa. She was starting to sweat by that point, just the slightest glistening sheen on her soft, dark skin.

 I pulled the vibrator away. That got a sound out of her, a little mewing disappointed sound. She opened her eyes and looked down at me like she was wondering what was wrong. I smiled and touched the vibrator to the spot she liked, but only for a second. Her eyes flashed wide, then narrowed, a smirk on her lips.

“Oh,” she said. “So that’s how you’re going to be?”

“If you don’t like it,” I said, giving her another second from the vibrator and then pulling away again. “Tell me to stop.”

“Don’t you dare,” she told me.

I teased her that way for a little while longer, then started alternating the vibrator with my tongue. Admittedly more for my benefit than hers, because the taste of her pussy was so addictive. I’d also unbuttoned my jeans and started jacking myself off while I pushed her closer and closer to the edge. I was getting pretty damn close myself.

When she came, she bared her teeth and tucked her chin down to her chest, knocking a geometric pillow off the couch with one hand while slapping the other back against the wall. Her long body seemed to curl inward, like her shoulders were straining to touch her quivering hips. She stayed silent almost all the way to the end, except for one word whispered so softly it was more like a breath.

“Damn,” she said.

 If there’s anything more beautiful in this world than a woman having an orgasm, I can’t imagine what it might be. Watching it pushed me over the edge right along with her, but I didn’t shut my eyes. Didn’t look away. I didn’t want to miss one second of the show.

When she’d had enough, she gripped my wrist to push the vibrator away, but to my surprise, she also pulled me into an embrace and kissed me. It was a good kiss, not hungry like before, but gentle and lingering. When she broke it, she pressed her sweat-damp face against my neck. Her close-cropped hair was soft and sweetly fragrant, a little ticklish against my cheek.

“That was beautiful,” she said.

“You’re beautiful,” I told her. “And it was my pleasure.”

She didn’t pull away, just let me hold her for a minute, comfortable and quiet against me. I thought she couldn’t keep the surprises coming, but she did.

“It’s really sad,” she said. “What happened to Angie.”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering where she was going with this. “Poor kid.”

“Her girlfriend must be heartbroken.”

 “Devastated,” I replied.

Some more silence, this one not so comfortable. I didn’t want to push her, so I just held her.

“Angie,” she said. “She seemed different. Different than before.”

“Different how?” I asked, again having to restrain an urge to do a touchdown dance.

I couldn’t imagine what I’d done to get lucky twice like that. In fact, my luck had been so good lately, I was starting to think I’d better start watching out for falling pianos.

“I don’t know.” She lifted her face to meet my gaze. “Angie used to be this wild, non-stop party girl, you know? Fun fun fun. Like it was all a big laugh and nothing really mattered. This time, she seemed…” She looked away. “Driven. Introverted and real serious, booking dates one after the other like she was on a mission.”

I took her warm face between my hands.

“Thanks for sharing that,” I told her. “You know you didn’t have to help me.”

“You didn’t have to rock my pussy,” she replied with that saucy little smirk. “But you did.” The smirk faded, eyes suddenly far away and thoughtful. “Anyway, that’s not the only reason. I can’t really explain it. It just seems… right.”

She pulled away and stood. I could see her struggling to come to some kind of difficult decision. I waited silently to see what it would be.

“I’m gonna go get cleaned up,” she finally said, gathering up her dress and shoes with her long bare back to me. “And while I’m in the bathroom, you better not look at Angie’s recent bookings, which are located on my hard drive in a file called Invoices under the subheading Tamara.”

“Thanks, Zoë,” I said, buttoning my jeans and getting my feet under me.

“Be gone when I get back,” she said over her shoulder, with a small dreamy smile that belied her chilly tone of voice.

Then she was gone, leaving me alone in the Vivian Lane front office.

Sure enough, the info on Angie’s dates during the past five days was exactly where Zoë told me I could find it. I didn’t see anything that immediately jumped out at me as a red flag, but I knew I’d need more time to sift through the raw data and flesh out the leads. I shot a few photos of the screen with my phone, scrolling down to make sure I got the whole list.

Once I had everything I needed, I noticed Zoë’s fancy pocketbook sitting there open on the floor near her desk. The temptation to go through it was almost overwhelming. I was still intensely curious about her, and you don’t get into the P.I. racket if you aren’t a nosy fucker to start with. It took every ounce of will I had to walk away. To let that beautiful, complex woman remain an unsolved mystery.

I did like she said and got gone.

14.

I called Penny, and we agreed to meet at Hwa Sun Ji Tea & Coffee down in K-town. It’s her favorite hang out, a quiet old-lady kind of teahouse which she claims serves the best tea in town. I don’t touch the stuff, so I’ll have to take her word on that. I will tell you this; their coffee sucks. I don’t mind, because Penny likes it there.

When I came in I found her at her usual table by the window, steaming pot of jasmine tea beside her open laptop. She was clacking away at the keys and started talking to me without taking her eyes off the screen.

“Something’s up with Angie’s sister,” she told me. “I have no idea what to make of it.” She finished typing and took her phone from her bulky, utilitarian purse, pressing a few buttons and then handing it to me. “Listen to this.”

I sat down opposite from Penny and held her phone to my ear.

“Um, hi?” a hesitant female voice said. “This is Vika? We met yesterday?” I could already feel a creeping dislike for this girl taking up residence in my gut. I always get annoyed with women who make everything they say sound like a question. “I really need to, um, talk to you about something? Like, a job? So, um, call me?”

“So did you call her?” I asked, handing the phone back to Penny.

“Yeah, but she was real vague and said she couldn’t talk over the phone.” Penny poured herself some more tea and then signaled the mousy, middle-aged waitress. “I told her I couldn’t agree to any job without consulting you first, because it was you, not me that she’d be hiring.”

“Does she know I’m a dyke?”

Penny shrugged.

“It didn’t come up.”

The waitress scuttled over, and Penny ordered something in Korean, pointing at me and then herself.

“I think you’re right, though,” I told her. “Something’s definitely up. I told Mickey last night that I’d do whatever I could to get her some kind of answers. I can’t help but wonder if this situation with the sister might be related. I’d be willing to bet she knows more than she’s letting on.” I thought suddenly of Beeker and the story of Angie’s hot blonde friend. “Penny, is Vika blond?”

“Bottle blonde,” Penny replied. “But yeah.”

“Got any photos?”

Penny tapped away on her keyboard and called up a page jammed with a zillion thumbnails. Clearly Vika was the kind of girl that loved to take photos of herself with her phone. She looked like a bleached Angie, but harder around the eyes, not as sweet and genuine as her sister. She certainly did have huge tits. One even might call them “ginormous.” This had to be the blonde friend who’d either been crying at Angie’s trick pad or made Angie cry.

I had looked through a handful of Vika’s shallow, silly photos and was about to turn the laptop back to Penny when I noticed one of the photos featured a younger Angie in the background. She wasn’t paying any attention to her sister, just sitting on the other side of the table and writing in a small notebook. But something about that photo really bothered me. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but whatever it was, it was making me nuts. When it hit me, it was like a slug in the gut.

I sucked in a deep breath and bent to study the photo more closely, not wanting to jump to conclusions. I tried to think of some reason why the image could have been reversed, but then I noticed that the 2008 calendar on the wall behind them was legible, letters in their normal left to right order.

“Fuck me,” I said.

“What?” Penny frowned.

“Fuck me!” I said again, jumping to my feet, scaring the crap out of the poor mousy waitress and almost wearing the cup of lousy coffee Penny had ordered for me.

I barely avoided getting tangled up in the hanging bamboo blinds between the tables as I apologized to the waitress all in a rush and then took out my own phone and dialed Mickey. She picked up on the first ring.

“You got something?”

Penny was giving me a WTF look, but I turned away, ignoring her.

“Mickey,” I said. “Was Angie a lefty?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Jesus.” I pushed my fingers through my hair. “Jesus fuck, Mickey. The cops found her with a needle in her left arm.”

Stunned silence on the other end of the line. Penny pressed her hand to her lips, eyes wide.

“I knew it, man,” Mickey finally said. “I fucking knew it.”

I couldn’t imagine what Mickey must have been feeling in that moment. Maybe elated to know that she had been right all along, but horrified to think that her girl really had been murdered.

“Okay, look, I’ve got some leads on the last people to see Angie alive,” I told her. “Plus there’s something weird going on with her sister, Vika. She says she wants to hire me for something but won’t say what. What do you know about her?”

“Vika? Nothing really,” she said. “Only that she didn’t hate on Angie as hard as her parents. I never met Vika, but Angie always complained that it was kinda… well kinda hot and cold between them.”

“How do you mean?”

“Vika was all kissyface and I-love-you-no-matter-what when she, like, needed a ride or something. But then she’d turn around and give Angie shit about embarrassing the family and not being a real woman.” Another long, weighty pause on the other end of the line. “In a way I think that was harder on her than being totally cut off by her parents, because she kept getting her hopes up that maybe her and Vika could still have some kind of relationship. Family was always real important to her. Me, my family don’t mean shit to me after the way they treated me growing up. Fuck em, right? I make my own family. But Angie, she still wanted that old-fashioned family thing, you know? Christmas, Sunday dinners, that kind of shit. They broke her heart every day, and she still loved them. That’s just the kind of girl she is. I mean… was…”

I was kind of blown away by this outpouring from Mickey. It was the longest string of words she’d said to me since we met. It was clear that she was finally starting to open up and trust me. It made me more determined than ever to crack this case and give her the closure she deserved.

Another long pause, then: “You gonna find the guy, right?”

“I’m gonna find the guy,” I told her.

“Listen,” she said. “I know you’re gonna have to get the cops involved pretty soon. And I mean no offense, ‘cause your friend Brink is pretty cool, but mostly they don’t care about people like me and Angie. They don’t care that my fucking heart is gone forever, you know? Okay, so maybe they’ll catch the guy and put him through the system, but I’ll tell you what, I’ve done time. It’s no fun, but it ain’t no kind of real punishment for what he done to my girl.”

I could see where she was going with this. Knowing she was right didn’t make what she was asking for any less wrong.

“I’m just saying, when you find this guy, maybe you could give me a heads up first. Just a couple hours advance notice, you know? That’s all I’m asking.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” I told her. “Do you think Angie would want you back in jail?”

“Angie would want me to forgive the guy, to think about his side of the story. Like maybe he had a bad childhood or something. Because she had a good heart.” I could hear her voice tighten, choking up a little. “But you know what? She’s gone now.” Another pause. “And I ain’t like that.”

“Let me see what I can do,” I said. “I’ll keep you in the loop.”

“Thanks, man.”

I ended the call and pocketed the phone.

I looked over at Penny. She was looking up at me over the tops of her glasses, and I could see in her eyes that she knew what Mickey was asking even though she could only hear my side of the conversation. She didn’t comment on it, and I couldn’t read her expression. She just handed me her phone.

“Better call Vika,” she said. “Find out what she wants.”

I dialed the number Penny had selected. No answer. Eventually, Vika’s voice, with thumping club music in the background.

“Too bad you missed me!”

Then a beep.

“Vika,” I said. “This is Roberta Fatale. You spoke to my assistant about hiring me for some sort of investigation. Please set up an appointment with Penny as soon as possible so that we can discuss your case.”

I gave her the office number, then ended the call and handed the phone back to Penny.

“Think we’ll hear back from her?” she asked, slipping the phone back into her purse.

“If we don’t, we’re gonna have to track her ass down,” I said. “I want to know what the hell is going on with her. But in the meanwhile, let’s go over Angie’s trick list.”

I called up the photos I’d taken at Vivian Lane’s office and we started working backwards from Angie’s last session, looking for anyone that stuck out or seemed unusual.

“What was the last session?” she asked.

“This seems odd,” I said.

“What?”

“She didn’t have any sessions on that last day. The last one listed here was at 10 pm the night before.”

“That is odd.” Penny frowned. “According to the police report, she’d been dead for under three hours when she was discovered.”

“She was booking dates like crazy with no breaks,” I said. “Then she just stopped.”

“So what was she doing between her last date and her death?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I said. “For now let’s just go over the johns we do have.”

“Right.”

“Henry Kashihara,” I read off the list. “Sleepy tit fuck. Must feign unconsciousness for the entire session.” I shook my head. “Sleepy? Huh. Well, I guess he couldn’t tell me if she was acting scared, unusual or out of sorts if she was acting asleep the whole time he was with her.”

Penny snickered, then got serious.

“That’s kinda weird isn’t it?” she said. “Almost like necrophilia.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “It’s conceivable that he might have come back the next morning for off-the-book seconds. Maybe he wanted to drug her to make her unconsciousness more realistic. Maybe he gave her too much and then got scared and took off.”

Penny typed for a minute. It was always amazing to watch Penny work her magic on that laptop, pulling secrets like fish from the rushing river of endless virtual information.

“Okay, Henry Kashihara. High-level exec in a company that specializes in industrial robotics. You know, like those automated arms that build cars. Blonde American trophy wife. Two kids, boys.” She typed a little more. “Shit, looks like he went straight from blowing a load on Angie’s sleepy tits to LAX. He had already landed in Tokyo several hours before the earliest edge of her time of death window. He’s not our man. Next?”

“Craig Lindermann,” I said. “Tit fuck with oral.”

“I sense a theme,” Penny said, clacking away on the keys. “I got more than one Craig Lindermann. Let me have his digits.”

I read off the number.

“Okay, here we go. Entertainment lawyer. Divorced, no kids.” More keyboard music. “This guy may be the busiest human being alive. I think he had six meetings in the time it took me to type his name. I wouldn’t scratch him off for good, but my gut says he’s not our man either. Who’s next?”

“Keeshawn Heard,” I said. “Wow.”

“Keeshawn Heard?” Penny repeated. “Isn’t he…?”

“Forward for the L.A. Lakers.” I finished for her. “You won’t believe what he’s into.”

“Whatever it is,” Penny said, calling up a photo of Heard posing with a gorgeous Laker Girl on each massive arm. “I’m surprised he has to pay for it.”

“Snuggling,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Penny said with a skeptically arched brow.

“I swear,” I said, turning my phone towards her so she could see the listing. “Says right here. Snuggling, no sex.”

“Snuggling?” Penny smirked. “I thought guys only snuggled because their wives wouldn’t put out if they didn’t. Anyway Heard was on the court when Angie was killed, so no dice on him. You know, I really wish I had access to the full Vivian Lane database. That way we could cross-reference these johns with other girls and see if anyone else had problems with them.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But what can I say, we got what we got. Next up Kelly Gillette. Oral.”

“Number.”

I gave Penny the number.

“Huh,” she said, leaning closer to the screen, fingers flying. “Kelly Michelle Gillette. A woman.”

Interesting, but I didn’t say anything. Penny was in deep, brow furrowed. I let her dig in silence.

“Okay, this one looks like a definite maybe.”

“Talk to me, baby,” I said. “How do you mean?”

“This chick is serious business,” Penny told me. “Former Marine. Four tours in Afghanistan. Now works private security. This is her idea of a relaxing vacation.”

She turned the laptop towards me to reveal a photo of a group of filthy, blood-caked and exhausted men at the finish line of some kind of extreme endurance event. The photo was labeled BULLDOG SECURITY MUD-DOGS, Tough Mudder 2010. There was only one woman in the group, and my eye was drawn right to her. She was probably blonde, though she was so muddy it was hard to tell. One of her clear green eyes had a nasty abrasion beneath it, and there was a deep split in her lower lip. Her body was astounding beneath her clinging, wet tank top and torn shorts. Muscular, but not hulking and squared-off like Brink. Powerful, yet still sleek and feminine. Her hips were wide but rock-solid, making her sculpted waist look even smaller by comparison. Her skin was goosebumped beneath the cold mud, and her defiant nipples stood out like tootsie-rolls through the wet fabric. But the thing that really caught my eye was the fact that she was the only one in the group who looked like she would be able to remain vertical for more than a few seconds after the shutter clicked. All the men in the photo were doubled over with one hand braced on a knee or an arm slung around their buddy’s shoulders, clearly at the very end of their apparently considerable endurance. Kelly stood tall, spine military straight. Beat to hell and back, but still plenty of gas in the tank. Damn, what a woman.

“Put it back in your pants, willya?” Penny said, letting me have a not-entirely-kidding sock in the arm. “This might be Angie’s killer.”

“But why?” I asked. “What possible motive could she have?”

“You’re the dick. ” Penny said.  “You tell me. I will say this: she was receiving outpatient treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder up until a little over nine months ago.”

“Hey, I was in the service too, remember?” I said. “We all had it rough over there. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and that alone certainly isn’t motive for murder.”

I looked back down at the list, ready to read off the next name, when I noticed something odd.

“But hey, look at this.” I enlarged the photo of the list and squinted at it to make sure I hadn’t misread. “She’s Angie’s only repeat customer in the last five days. Not just twice. Three times. That’s some pretty pricy action for a working stiff.”

“Especially since she reported an income of…” The keyboard clicked and clacked. “Just over forty seven grand on her 2010 tax return. And check this address. Luxury condo on Ocean Drive in Santa Monica. Place like that’d go for, what, two mil? Two point five?”

“All right,” I said. “I’m intrigued. You keep up the cyber-digging, and I’ll go check out Ms. Gillette in the flesh. Tail her and see what she’s up to.”

“Tail her,” Penny said, pouting. “Right.” She typed, then clicked. “I’m emailing you Gillette’s address and plates.”

I checked my email on my phone and confirmed Penny’s incoming message. She’d attached a photo of Kelly, an unflattering, harshly lit DMV mug-shot. It was obvious that Penny had chosen the least attractive photo she could find.

The nervous waitress returned with more coffee and a plate of rolled-up cookies just as I stood to leave.

“Have you eaten anything today?” Penny asked.

“Not yet, “ I replied, wolfing down a cookie and then snagging another for the road. “Maybe I’ll grab a bite out in Santa Monica.”

“Or you could have lunch with me,” she said. “Come back to my place. I’m a real good cook.”

“I’ll bet you are,” I said. “But I gotta go, baby.”

“I suppose I’ll pick up the check,” Penny said with a dramatic sigh. “Like I always do.”

“You’re the best,” I told her.

“Don’t you fucking forget it.”

I didn’t. I couldn’t. But I still went off to chase another dame.

15.

Traveling from the east side to the ocean can be more treacherous than crossing the fucking Alps. You can forget the 10 freeway. Might as well walk. Wilshire seemed okay until I hit Highland, where it got all snarled up and stalled. I tried Pico. By the time I passed WoodlawnCemetery, my stomach was making alarming werewolf noises at me. Penny was right, as usual. I did need to grab a bite. And while I’d much rather be eating Penny’s bulgogi, I was pretty sure there used to be a better-than-decent taco truck over by the Costco in Venice. I took a quick detour down to Washington to investigate.

Turned out the truck was still there, so I filled the tank with carne asada and hot salsa, then grabbed a fistful of cheap energy bars and some bottled water for the long haul.

Kelly Gillette’s condo was an ostentatious ultramodern glass tower called The Oceania. I pulled the Fury around to Alta Avenue and parked in front of a hydrant on the opposite side of the street, grabbing a faded Dodgers cap from under the passenger seat and snugging it down low over my eyes. I opened up my outdated Thomas Guide in my lap like I was lost, but what I was really doing was keeping an eye on the entrance to the Oceania’s garage.

Sitting on a location and waiting for someone to show up is tougher than you’d think. It’s boring, but you need to stay sharp and focused. You can’t fuck off too much while you’re waiting. You wouldn’t want to miss your subject because you got sucked into reading SheWired or searching for photos of Vida Guerra’s ass.

What I usually try to do is occupy myself with the details of the case, thinking things over and over again. Sifting, working the angles. Looking for patterns or inconsistencies. All the while keeping an eye on whatever I was watching. But for some reason, I found myself thinking about Penny instead. Of course, trying to not think about Penny just made me think about her more.

Then, there was Kelly.

I almost missed her because I’d been looking for the green ’74 Mustang she had registered with the DMV. She was behind the wheel of a black Lincoln Town Car instead. A professional car. Pristine and all business, with deep-tinted windows in the back, but sporting private plates, not livery. This wasn’t a rented limo, it was someone’s personal vehicle. Someone other than Kelly.

When she came driving down the alley behind the building towards the garage, my casual interest in scoping a good-looking blonde swiftly shifted to recognition, releasing a flush of hot excitement in my belly.

Her hair was pulled back in a neat, utilitarian braid. Minimal make-up, just mascara and a neutral lipstick, but still much more beautiful that her photos. Maybe beautiful is the wrong word. Or the right word, but not nearly specific enough. She had a cool, classic profile and a strong chin. A small, taciturn mouth and crow’s feet at the corners of those sharp, green eyes. She was dressed in a dark suit jacket and white shirt, open at the throat. Leather driving gloves. Her face was set in alert neutral, and she spotted me almost immediately.

My heart floored it in my chest. Not just because I was nervous about getting made, but because I suddenly found myself wanting her to look at me. To see me. Grateful for the ball cap, I tipped my face down like I was studying the map, hiding my features in the shadow of the bill while still watching her out of the corner of my eye. She looked away, dismissing me as irrelevant, and turned the car into the garage.

I let out my held breath in a long slow stream. This woman wasn’t going to be an easy target. She was clearly a pro, a hired gun. Most people spend the majority of their time utterly oblivious to the world around them, eyes glued to their phone, narcotized by routine. Not Kelly. Following her wasn’t going to be cat-and-mouse. More like cat-and-cat. I was gonna have to step up my game.

I muscled the Fury into starting on the third try and drove around the block, scouting for a smarter, less obvious location. Turned out there was another, perpendicular alley connected to the one behind the Oceania. A pair of good-looking young Mexican guys had their tree-trimming service truck parked beneath a shaggy eucalyptus and were sawing off broken branches while engaged in what sounded like an intense discussion of some very serious problem. It was obvious from their facial expressions which guy had the problem and which guy was trying to offer advice on the problem. I slid the Fury ass-first into a driveway behind their truck, backing up until I found the sweet spot that hid my big ugly car, but still afforded me an uninterrupted view of the Oceania’s garage driveway.

Just over an hour had passed when the tree-trimmers finished bobbing the eucalyptus and started gathering up all the fallen leaves and twigs. They hadn’t come to any practical resolution of the problem. I was getting ready to move to a fresh spot before they drove away and exposed my hiding place, when a green ‘74 Mustang pulled out of the garage.

I let it turn down Alta towards the ocean then followed, a good, safe distance behind.

I picked it up heading down Ocean towards the pier. The Mustang’s green paint job was more olive-drab than lurid fluorescent, but it stood out in the thick stream of mostly gray and black traffic, punctuated by the occasional red midlife sports car. Kelly’s blond hair was still braided, but she had changed into a sporty racer-back tank top, navy blue with white stripes. Delts to die for. I could have guessed where she was headed based on that outfit, but my hunch was confirmed when she continued on past Chez Jay’s and down into Venice.

Sure enough, I wound up killing more than three long hours parked down the block from Gold’s Gym. At least I had a regular parade of flushed and sweaty women in work-out togs to keep me entertained while I waited. There are plenty of worse places to be stuck on stakeout.

Meanwhile I just wasn’t getting anywhere with why someone like Kelly would want to off someone like Angie. Or even why she would pay so much money to get head from her. Unless….

I pulled out my phone and speed-dialed Penny.

“You still on Kelly Gillette?” she asked as soon as she picked up.

“Yeah,” I said. “She’s pumping iron at Gold’s Venice right now. Listen, have you got an employer for her?”

“Bulldog Security,” she said.

“I mean a person,” I said. “An individual. Who is she protecting right now?”

I could hear typing over the phone.

“Last gig I can find on the books was three months ago,” she said. “A two-week stint babysitting a British pop singer while she was in town shooting a music video. Bethany Beale. Went home to the UK in May.” More typing. “Currently in rehab. Round three.”

“Never mind that,” I said. “Kelly was driving a Town Car when she came home today.” I looked down at my notes and rattled off the plate numbers. “She was dressed like a chauffeur, so she’s obviously working for somebody right now. Someone who pays really well.”

“Somebody who pays off the books,” she said. “Maybe somebody who doesn’t want it known that Kelly is working for her.”

“But why be so secretive about your security staff?” I asked. “Unless you hired that person to hire hookers for you. Or…”

“Or,” she finished for me. “Hired that person to kill hookers for you.”

“Jesus,” I said.

And, as if cued, there was Kelly. She had changed out of her gym clothes and was in full-on femme war-paint and killer heels. Strapless black dress so tight and flawlessly tailored she looked sewed into it. Seamed stockings, the tiny bumps of each garter snap visible through the fabric of the dress. Her hair was loose from its braid, brushed out in burnished waves. Sharp green eyes lined with liquid black, scanning the parking lot. Meticulously clocking every car, every pedestrian. She looked down the street away from me and seemed to be about to turn her head in my direction. I knew if she spotted my car, there’d be no way she would fail to remember seeing it behind her condo. But a pair of muscle-head guys on their way into the gym saved my ass by cat-calling her and distracting her before she could spot me. She turned away from me and them, nothing but ice as she shouldered her duffle bag and walked back to her car.

“Butch?”

I had forgotten Penny was on the line. In fact, Kelly looked so damn good I almost forgot what the little electronic device in my hand was for.

“She just got into her car,” I told Penny, starting up the Fury. “I’m gonna stay on her, but in the meanwhile, keep digging, deep and hard. I want to know who she’s working for.”

“You got it,” she said, ending the call.

I hadn’t been all that surprised that she went to Gold’s Gym. When she pointed her Mustang east and headed into West Hollywood, I wasn’t all that surprised when we ended up at Girl Habit.

16.

Girl Habit is my least favorite lesbian club in LA. Which isn’t saying much, because I’m not all that into the whole club scene anymore anyway. I can’t dance and don’t like shouting in women’s ears. I’m not into drunk chicks and have no interest in drugs. Plus this particular club is a magnet for the kind of young, predatory party bois whose hyper-exaggerated macho posturing and weirdly misogynistic attitude towards femmes has always rubbed me the wrong way. I’m not saying that hooking up with lots of different women is wrong, obviously. I just don’t think it’s cool or edgy to ape all the most negative masculine stereotypes without giving any play to the upsides. You know, things like bravery or chivalry or the desire to provide for and protect your loved ones. I may be a tom cat, but I’m still a gentleman at heart. At least I try to be.

Of course, making these-young-dykes-today comments like I just did proves that I’m officially becoming an old fart.

But, like it or not, Girl Habit was the perfect place for me to see if I couldn’t cozy up to Kelly. Get a few drinks into her and get her talking.

It was still pretty early in the evening when Kelly valeted her Mustang and sauntered into the Habit, so I took a quick detour to drop my car off with my pal Oscar. He’s a valet at a neighboring boy bar, a invaluable snitch who knows pretty much everything that goes down in WeHo and is always willing to trade gossip for cash. I gave him a twenty to hide the Fury in their lot while I went to try my luck with Kelly.

Being so early, the room was still pretty empty. A gaggle of flashy, Real L-Word wannabees, talking too loud and already drunk. A few quiet, turtledoving duos in the shadowy corners. A scattering of self-conscious loners nursing beers, trying to look brave and act like it didn’t bother them that the L-Word girls didn’t know they existed. And Kelly.

She was like magnetic north. It was impossible not to be pulled towards her. I ordered a beer of my own and made myself hang back, watching her.

The first pass came from a barely legal, bleach-blond boi who broke off from the chatty group to try her luck. No dice. Kelly was cool and polite, but made it absolutely clear that she was not interested. When the disappointed boi slunk back over to get her balls busted by her snickering friends, one of the loners decided to give it a go. This was an older butch, heavy-set and steel-haired with dark, melancholy eyes. No dice again.

This track record didn’t bode well for me. She’d shot down two potential suitors, both on the more masculine end of the spectrum. If she was into other femmes, I was shit out of luck. I found myself wondering if maybe she had hired Angie for herself after all. But if she could afford that kind of action, why waste time trawling for mediocre hookups at Girl Habit?

But then she turned those green searchlight eyes on me. Not just sizing me up, but making solid eye contact. Silently inviting me over. I gave her a slight nod, killed the rest of my beer and then headed slowly over to where she sat like it was no big deal. I slid onto the stool beside her and tried to get my thumping heart under control.

“You’ve been watching me,” she said.

“Everyone in this bar is watching you,” I replied.

“Not like you are,” she said.

I shrugged, smirked.

“Can you blame me?”

She finished her drink, not breaking eye contact.

“Police or military?” she asked.

I smiled and shook my head. Damn, she was good.

“Both,” I replied. “But that’s ancient history. I got my own outfit now.”

“Private security?”

I nodded, hoping she didn’t grill me on it and call bullshit. My mind was racing, plotting conversational decision trees, trying to think of how to get the hooks in. I figured swapping stories about the ‘Stan was a bad idea, given her history with PTSD, and I didn’t want to spook her by coming on too hard right away. Because, as sexy as she was, I needed to talk to her more than I needed to fuck her. And because, to be honest, she scared me a little. More than a little.

She didn’t tell me that she was in the same line of work, she just nodded, almost to herself, and then signaled the bartender.

“What are you drinking?” I asked, gesturing to her empty glass with my chin.

“Stoli, on the rocks.”

I ordered what she wanted and another eight-dollar beer from the bouncy Anime bartender. Drinking in those WeHo bars is almost as expensive as a date from the Vivian Lane girls, but that’s the price of doing my kind of business.

“What’s your name?” I made myself ask, even though I already knew.

“Kelly,” she said. “You?”

“Butch.”

She stifled a little half-laugh.

“Really? Do you have a dog named Dog?”

“Well, it’s Roberta if you must know,” I said. “But nobody calls me that.”

“I can see why,” she said with the smallest hint of a smile. “I have an Aunt Roberta. She’s nothing like you.”

The drinks came. I paid and slid the vodka over to Kelly.

“You from L.A. originally?” I asked.

“No,” she said, but didn’t elaborate. She toyed with her glass but didn’t drink. “How about you?”

“Back east,” I told her. “Union City, PA. You know, small town, no future. Dad was a boxer, died when I was nine. There were five of us kids, so mom worked two jobs. Military was pretty much the only way out.”

“South Bend, Indiana,” she said, taking a healthy slug of her drink. “Same script, different actors.”

Of course, I already knew that, too. I didn’t spend all my time parked outside Gold’s Gym starting at asses in yoga pants. I also knew that she ran track back in high school and had run the L.A. Marathon every year since she moved here in 2007. That she had excellent credit and carried under 500 dollars in debt. That she was allergic to cats and her left shoulder sometimes popped out of the socket because of an old, badly healed injury. I knew all kinds of fun facts about Kelly Gillette, but not the one that mattered. Who she was working for.

Normally, I hate talking about my past. It just doesn’t feel relevant anymore, like a series of events that happened to someone else. I do miss my dad sometimes, but most of the time, I try not to think about it. My mom, well, I don’t think she even noticed I was gone. Anyway the whole point of bringing that shit up with Kelly was that I knew she and I had similar backgrounds and I was hoping to establish some kind of simpatico connection between us. But she was so hard to read, I couldn’t tell if it was working or not.

I knew what my next conversational gambit should be. An amusing anecdote about working private security. Some kind of insider, job-related humor to make her laugh, and maybe reciprocate with a story of her own. Hopefully about whoever she was working for now. There was only one problem. I don’t actually work private security.

So there I was, wracking my brain, trying to think of every private security goon I’d ever met and remember if they’d shared any stories that I could adapt and use when she tossed back the rest of her vodka and said;

“Do you want to get out of here?”

Just like that, I was walking out of Girl Habit with the most coveted woman in the room on my arm. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t get a little kick out of all the dirty looks that followed me out the door.

17.

“Did you valet?” she asked as I opened the door for her and motioned for her to go ahead.

“I took a cab,” I lied.

“We can take my car,” she said, handing her own ticket to the valet.

We stood together on the sidewalk, close but not touching. Her looking east, watching for her car. Me looking west, even though I really wanted to look at her. Put my arm around her muscular waist. Bury my face in her clean hair. But I didn’t do any of those things. Awkward silence stretched out between us.

When her car pulled up she tipped the valet and got behind the wheel while I took the shotgun seat. She was the one who broke the silence.

“I hate that place,” she said, pulling away from the curb. “Honestly, I don’t even know why I bother to go there.”

“To meet me,” I replied.

She shot me an arched eyebrow.

“Cocky fucker, aren’t you?”

“You have to be in my line of work,” I said, still hoping to find a way to get her talking shop.

She didn’t take the bait.

“No really,” she said. “It’s funny, you know. Every time I go there, I tell myself I’m never going back. But then there I am again. Sometimes it’s easier to fuck women you don’t like.”

“Ah,” I said. “So that’s why you picked me.”

“Shit,” she said. “I didn’t mean it like that. You must think I’m a total cunt.”

“Nah,” I said. “Just a half a cunt. A third, maybe.”

She laughed. It was surprisingly genuine, eyes crinkling in the corners. She put her right hand on my thigh. She had short nails, no polish. I took her hand, twinning my fingers with hers. The distinctive trigger callus on the inside of her index finger was a powerful reminder of exactly what kind of woman I was dealing with here.

Outside the car, the rainbow neon sparkle of WeHo segued into dark, leafy Beverly Hills. We were quiet for a moment, but it didn’t seem uncomfortable. When she took her hand back to signal a turn, I put mine on her leg. Her thigh was coiled steel under the slippery nylon of her stocking.

“I do like you,” she said, easing her legs open just a little. Just enough that I could run my fingers up under her skirt if I wanted to.

“Thanks,” I said, accepting the invitation. “I like you, too.”

That was it for conversation until we hit the ocean.

When she pulled into the Oceania’s garage, I whistled.

“Damn,” I said as she parked the Mustang beside the familiar Town Car. “This is a hell of an address. You must be doing all right for yourself.”

“Not too bad,” she replied, killing the engine and getting out. “My current gig’s a pain in the ass, but it’s worth it.”

I got out too and came around to her side of the car, finally feeling like I was getting somewhere.

“Yeah,” I said. “What’s the gig?”

She slid an arm around my waist and pulled me in close, leaning back against the car door.

“I don’t want to talk about work,” she said.

I did. I swear I really did, but I couldn’t help myself. I kissed her.

She kissed me like she owned me. Her strong hands gripped my waist and my right arm like I was a piece of equipment, fluidly shifting her weight so I had no choice but to shift with her until she put me right where she wanted me. Which was turned around with the backs of my legs pushed up against the hood of the Mustang, spine bent just far enough back that I felt helpless and off-balance but not enough to make me fall.

I spar with Brink all the time in the gym, and the two of us are always rough-housing and wrestling during our sexual play, but it never felt anything like that. I guess I’m just not wired to bottom to another butch, but something about a strong, steely femme brings me to my knees every time. Kelly was without a doubt the strongest, steeliest femme I’d ever met.

I didn’t stand a chance.

She broke the kiss and looked at me, those sharp green eyes like lockpicks. She slid a hand up my spine, firmly cupping the back of my neck, and I was sure that she was on to me. That she knew I’d been tailing her and was just playing with me. That she was deciding whether or not to let me live.

“It’s so hot,” she said. “Let’s take a walk.”

She let me go and I managed not to fall on my ass. Barely.

“In those heels?” I said, trying to act nonchalant, like nothing had changed between us.

She smiled and kicked them off, tossing them into the Mustang’s back seat and pulling a pair of expensive sneakers from her gym bag. She slipped into one, then the other, lacing them up on her stockinged feet.

I just stood there, watching her skirt creep up to reveal the darker tops of her stockings as she tied her sneakers. I was genuinely scared and ferociously turned on in equal measure.

Without her heels, she was a little shorter than me. 5’8” maybe. She kissed me again, lightly. Just a quick flicker of her hot little tongue between my lips that was echoed by a resonant ghost flicker down below. The fact that she had to tilt her head up to reach me didn’t make me feel any more in charge of the situation.

“Come on,” she said, taking my hand.

We crossed the street to the strip of park between Ocean Avenue and PCH and then headed south down a path lined with leggy palm trees. She looked deceptively cute in her sneakers and sexy dress. She still held my hand but didn’t need to. I was pretty much willing to follow her anywhere at that point.

We stopped by a trio of green benches and she kissed me again, teasing me. All the while maintaining that powerful grip on the back of my neck. I thought of an old self-defense instructor who had gripped the back of my neck like that, explaining to the class that if you can control your opponent’s head, you control their whole body. Kelly demonstrated the validity of this concept by using that single-handed grip to sit me down on the bench like I was a puppet. She turned away, looking out at the ocean, and then straddled one of my thighs, sitting half in my lap with her legs as wide open as they could get in that tight skirt. I put my one arm around her taut waist and brushed her hair aside to kiss the delicate skin beneath her ear. She didn’t wear any discernable perfume, but I could smell her sweet, fruity shampoo and the clean, natural scent of her warm skin.

“You said your father was a boxer,” she said. “What was his name?”

Why the hell did she want to talk about my father all of a sudden?

“Why?” I asked, cold dread duking it out with the hot desire still burning in my belly. “You a fight fan?”

She shook her head, blond hair brushing my cheek.

“My dad was,” she said. “He won 200 dollars on a light heavyweight named Rocco Fatale. It was the only time he ever won anything in his miserable, unlucky life. Bought us all new dresses. That fighter looked a lot like you.”

“Small fucking world,” I replied, cursing my own luck.

“I feel lucky right now,” she said taking my hand and putting it between her legs.

Any thoughts I might have had about my father or my job or what the hell I thought I was doing with this dangerous woman were instantaneously vaporized by the slick heat of her pussy beneath her thin panties.

She made a soft sound of wordless encouragement, grinding her wide, muscular ass against my thigh as my fingers slipped under the damp silk. She had fat, tight outer labia that had been waxed smooth, and hidden between them were narrow, almost negligible inner lips capped by a tiny, white-hot clit. She was already wet and getting wetter. I felt like I might die if I couldn’t taste her.

“Baby,” I whispered. “You’re killing me.”

She took my hand from between her legs and brought it to her lips, taking my first two fingers into her hot mouth for a fleeting second. I shuddered and closed my eyes, almost faint with hunger.

“I know,” she said.

She stood then and my body felt cold in her absence. She hadn’t let go of my hand and she used it to pull me to my feet beside her. When she kissed me again, I could taste a teasing hint of her pussy on her lips. Getting down on my knees and begging her to take me back to her place seemed like a perfectly reasonable course of action at that point, but I didn’t do it. I just let her lead me further down the path, further away from her condo.

We walked in silence for several minutes. I was trying to get my head back on, to let the cool ocean breeze sober me up from the intoxicating effect of Kelly. To remember why I was here in the first place. I was there to talk, not to fuck.

My cunt didn’t want to hear it.

“It must be nice to have all this as your front yard,” I made myself say.

“You like the beach?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said, even though I’m a die-hard Eastsider who never ventures west of La Brea unless there’s a paycheck involved.

“The beach is okay,” she said. “But I really love the ocean. When I retire, I want to get a boat. Sail from port to port. Just me and the ocean.”

“Sounds kind of lonely,” I said. “Don’t you want a first mate to keep you company?”

“I don’t know, maybe,” she said, shrugging. “I’m not all that good with relationships.”

“Is anybody?” I asked. “You just figure it out as you go along.”

We walked for a few more silent minutes, until she stopped and leaned against the fence, looking across PCH and the red Spanish roofs of the houses below to the ocean beyond.

“I haven’t had a serious girlfriend in three years,” she said. “When anyone tries to get close, I just… shut down. I think maybe that part of me is broken.”

I came up to the fence beside her, arm around her waist.

“Or maybe you just haven’t met the right woman.”

“It’s not that,” she said, dismissive.

“Jeez,” I said. “Way to shoot down my smooth, romantic dialog.”

She didn’t laugh, just looked up at me with something raw and ugly just beneath the surface of those clear green eyes.

“I… lost someone.” She looked away, out across the ocean. “I don’t ever want to feel that again.”

She turned completely away from me then, retreating into herself. I ran my hands up and down her arms and then pulled her gently into a belly-to-back embrace.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I could tell by her tone and the awful pause before she said lost that she didn’t mean a bad break-up.

“I didn’t hold her,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?” I asked, wary. Not at all ready for this particular swerve in the conversation.

“I wanted to,” she said. “I really did, but it was so… So horrible. I just fucking stood there. And then it was too late. That still bothers me.”

What the hell do you say in response to something like that? I had no idea, so I just held her.

She leaned back into me, head against my shoulder. All the humming tension in her body began to dissipate, like that strange, intimate confession had released some kind of pressure valve inside her. She turned to face me, looking up at me. She wasn’t any kind of bad-ass dominatrix in that moment. She was just a lonely woman fighting her way out from under a mountain of hurt.

“I really feel like I can trust you,” she said.

Man, that made me feel like a heel. I was hoping to get her to open up, but not like this. She kissed me again. I let her. It hurt to pull away.

“Kelly,” I said. “I should go.”

“But…” She looked up at me, puzzled and a little hurt.

“You’re very beautiful,” I said, running my fingers along the strong angle of her jaw. “And I would love to see you again. I just think maybe we should take it a little slower. Get to know each other better first.”

She smiled. That smile made her look like a whole different person. It made me feel like the world’s biggest asshole.

“Okay,” she said. She put out her hand. “Give me your phone.”

I handed it over and she punched in her number.

“Here,” she said, handing it back. “I don’t have my phone with me. Didn’t feel like wearing the work leash around my neck tonight, you know? But if you call me right now, then I’ll have your number too.”

If I refused, I’d look even more like a heel than I already felt, but there was no way I was gonna give her my number. She already knew way too much about me.

I flipped through my contacts, past her name to the number for my favorite Vietnamese restaurant. I dialed and held the phone to my ear, trying to keep my expression in mild, happy neutral.

The restaurant’s answering machine picked up. I let it go on for a minute about their address and business hours and special dishes, then said;

“It’s Butch. Tag, you’re it.”

I ended the call and made myself smile at her.

“Done,” I said.

 “Can I give you a lift somewhere?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“I’ll get a cab,” I told her.

I walked her back to her condo. She let me have another toe-curling kiss before she let me go.

Sometimes being a gentleman really sucks.

18.

I got a buzz from Penny on the cab ride back to WeHo.

“Well?” she said as soon as I answered.

“Well what?” I asked. “Well did I find out who she works for, or well did I fuck her?

“Why would I even bother to ask if you fucked her? That would be like asking if traffic is backed up on the 405.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “Fuck her or find out who she works for.”

“You didn’t fuck her? What, you’re not her type?”

“Oh I’m her type,” I said. “I could have but I just… well, I just couldn’t go through with it.”

“Have I got the wrong number? This is my boss, Butch Fatale, right? You haven’t been replaced by a space pod or something have you?”

“Knock it off, Penny,” I said. “I guess I just felt bad for her.”

“You felt bad for her? Have you forgotten that she might be a killer?”

“Of course not…” I began, but to be honest, I kinda had.

Penny cut me off.

“Hold on a sec,” she said. “I got Vika calling on the other line.”

She clicked over to the other call while the cabbie pulled up to the lot where I’d left the Fury. I paid him from my swiftly diminishing bankroll and had just gotten behind the wheel of my own car when Penny came back on the line.

“Okay, listen,” she said. “She wants to meet, and it’s got to be right now. I’m texting you the address.”

“Right,” I said. “No rest for the fucking wicked.”

* * *

Vika was holed up with a friend who lived at the Americana at Brand in Glendale. It’s an open-air shopping mall below and luxury apartments above. This strange-bedfellows combo has always creeped me out a little. There’s something kind of Logan’s Run about living in a mall. But maybe I only think that because I’m over 30. Anyway, I’d always wondered who lived in places like that. Now I knew.

Vika’s friend was named Ashley and was clearly being supported by Daddy, biological or otherwise. She was Armenian too, with a short, sturdy build, chubby legs and way more ass than tits. Black hair striped with red and too much eye-liner. Bedazzled Ed Hardy tracksuit and sparkly pink toenails. She let me in with a flushed, barely contained excitement, like a child playing in a secret hideout made from sofa cushions.

Her studio apartment was very similar in layout to Vivian’s trick pad, but that was the only thing they had in common. This was not a set. This was a real girl’s apartment. Clothes everywhere, most with the price tags still attached. Empty Diet Coke cans and take-out containers. Lotion and lipstick and glitter body spray. Perfume samples torn from magazines. A large bottle of cheap vodka, nearly empty, and an equally depleted bottle of some godawful toxic-green Reanimator fluid labeled “Skinny Appletini.” The furniture beneath the clutter was expensive, but gaudy and mismatched, like each piece had been chosen by different teenager.

Vika was laying on her belly across the atrocious gold fairy-princess bed but stood when I walked in, nearly falling out of her tiny black tube dress. The dress was not unlike the dress that Kelly had been wearing. Similar in shape, tight and strapless, leaving nothing to the imagination. Except this dress had a labia-high hemline and was made from cheap, shiny spandex.

In person, Vika didn’t look anything like her sister. Her features were similar and her build nearly identical, but while Angie’s personality made her more beautiful, Vika’s personality had the opposite effect. Angie had seemed so real and genuine, but Vika was all artifice and bad acting. Self-consciously faux-sexy and perpetually on the make. She positioned her body like she was posing for imaginary photographers, leading with her tits. Back arched and belly sucked in, glossy lips thrust out in a practiced pout, but all that sexy never reached her dark eyes. Her eyes were shrewd and calculating. A predator’s eyes, always looking for opportunities to isolate and devour the weaker members of the herd.

“Ok, I’m here,” I said, in no mood for kid gloves. “Start talking.”

“Ohmygod,” she said, all in one hot, boozy breath. “This is so awful. I didn’t know where else to turn.”

Her acting shifted from bad softcore porn to bad Lifetime woman-in-danger drama as she made her eyes real big and teary and clenched her hands up under her chin, making sure to squeeze her tits together with her upper arms in the process.

I was having none of it.

“By ‘this’ I assume you mean your sister’s murder. Care to elaborate?”

 “I thought…” Her brave-but-scared-heroine act faltered for a moment, and she reached for a nearby glass, downing a healthy swallow of the scary green liquid. “I mean the police said…”

“You know as well as I do that she was murdered,” I told her. “So cut the soap opera and make with the backstory before I change my policy against roughing up girls.”

She sat down on the bed, looking up at me like I just kicked her dog. It was the first semi-genuine expression I’d seen on her face.

“Okay, God!” She ditched the empty glass and wrapped her arms around herself, defensive. When she spoke again it was a headlong breathless rush. “So this guy wants twenty thousand dollars because I witnessed this murder and he says if I don’t pay him then he’s gonna show the video to those Armenian Power guys who will totally kill me, right? And so I told Angie about it and she was all ‘you better pay him’ so she said she’d get me the money and I…”

“Whoa,” I said. “Slow down. You witnessed a murder? What murder? What video?”

“It was like, um, some kind of gang thing?” she said, that annoying questioning tone in her voice again. She picked up the empty glass, looked into it like she expected it to be magically full again, then set it back down. “I’ve never been so scared in my whole life, but I like hid, you know? Out on the balcony.”

“Okay,” I said, deeply skeptical. “How does the blackmailer and the video fit in?”

 “This guy over in the next building, he saw me out there hiding. He saw me and he had this video camera. He shot video of me hiding on the balcony during the murder. He knows that if those gang guys ever find out I saw them killing my boyfriend, I’m totally dead.”

Something was fishy about her story. Something? Everything. The idea of her needing money and Angie agreeing to go back to tricking to provide it was the only element that made any sense. The rest was obvious bullshit.

“Blackmailers usually don’t resort to murder,” I told her. “And these gang guys supposedly don’t know about you yet, so who killed your sister?” 

“I don’t know,” she wailed, suddenly going all teary-eyed. “All I know is…”

Her phone rang. Katy Perry, The One That Got Away. That ringtone made me want to slap her. Well, more than I already did. I also wanted to toss the phone out the window, hold her down, and make her come clean about what was really going on, but I didn’t. I could see that I was gonna have to play out the string in order to learn the truth.

She fumbled with it for a second, then looked down at the screen.

“Oh my God, it’s him!”

She took the call.

“Hello?” She looked over at me then at her friend, mimicking writing in the air. “Okay, hold on.” Ashley put a sparkly purple pen in her hand. “420 Magnolia Avenue.” She wrote on the back of her left hand with her right. “Twenty minutes. Okay.”

She ended the call.

“Ash,” she dropped the pen to the carpet and held out her hand to her saucer-eyed friend. “Gimme the money.”

Ashley scrambled around in the mess until she came up with a large black and white checked Harajuku Lovers duffle bag, which she pressed into Vika’s open arms. Vika clutched it tight to her tits and turned to me.

“Let’s go.”

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “What makes you think I’m going anywhere with you?”

“You have to,” she said, seeming genuinely shocked, like I had just suggested that I might not fall if I jumped off the balcony. “That’s the job I’m hiring you for.” She slung the bag over her shoulder. “I can pay.”

“You got me all wrong,” I told her. “I’m a dick, not a bodyguard.”

“I don’t care if you like girls,” she said. “I totally support gay marriage.”

“Dick, not dyke, genius,” I said. “As in detective. I’m an investigator, I don’t do muscle jobs.”

“Look, we don’t have time to talk about sex right now,” she said. “I have to meet this guy and hand over the money in, like, seventeen minutes. So are you coming or not?” Her eyes narrowed, suddenly clever. “Because if you let me go off alone and get killed, I’ll never have a chance to tell you the rest of what I know.”

She was right, the manipulative little bitch.

So that’s how I got my first private security gig. And if nothing else came of it, the next time I saw Kelly, I’d have an amusing on-the-job anecdote to share with her after all.

19.

The meet was in an industrial neighborhood off San Fernando. The address turned out to belong to one of those weird rounded metal buildings that look like half of a giant beer can. Across the street was a lot full of crook-necked cherry pickers that seemed to be craning their boxy, basket heads to watch out for us. I drove past slowly, casing the parking lot. Three cars, including one that was occupied. A tan ‘87 Corolla with more Bondo than paint. Certainly not the kind of ride I’d be caught dead in if I were an Armenian gang member. Short-haired head behind the wheel, but backlit by bright security lamps, so I couldn’t make out any detail.

I had already phoned Penny and let her know I’d need her to record the event for posterity, just in case. I figured two could play at the video strong-arm game. She’d burned through the back streets while we were stuck on Brand Boulevard and so she beat us to the drop. We passed her little Honda parked just down the block with two round silver sunshades set up under the windshield. I couldn’t see her, but I caught the slightest glint off her lens and knew she was good to go. What the hell would I do without that girl?

“Here’s how it’s gonna go,” I told Vika. “I’m gonna let you out a block away. Give me time to pull the car up and park across the street.”

“I don’t feel so good,” Vika said.

“Look, it’s going to be fine,” I said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“You have a gun, right?”

“Of course,” I told her. It wasn’t exactly a lie. I do have a gun. Several guns. Back at my office.

“I should have worn different shoes,” she said.

“You’re probably right,” I said, looking down at her glittery platform heels. “But it’s too late now.” I reached across her body and opened the passenger door. “Go.”

She got out, unsteady on her goofy shoes, then headed towards the lot. I sped past her and pulled into a spot beside the locked gate to the cherry picker lot across the street, watching her in my rear view. She stumbled twice and had to hike up her perpetually slipping dress a few times but eventually made it to the lot, bag in hand.

Unsurprisingly, the guy who got out of the Corolla was not an Armenian gangster. For starters, he was black, which pretty much ruled out any involvement with the notoriously racist Armenian gangs. Then add on the fact that he looked like a total nerd. Green Lantern t-shirt. Thick glasses. Fast-food physique. If I had to bet on a fist fight between him and Vika, my money wouldn’t be on him. The guy obviously didn’t see me. Total amateur hour. I was beginning to wonder what the hell I was doing here.

“Okay,” she said. “Where’s the tape?”

The guy patted his pockets in a half-assed pantomime of looking for a tape.

“Well,” Vika said, voice high and strident. “Have you got it or not?”

“It’s right…” He paused, shooting a look at the beer-can building. “Here.”

“Where?” Vika asked, taking a crooked, wobbly step towards him.

He grabbed her by the arm.

“I got her,” he yelled to someone I couldn’t see. “Now where’s my reward?”

“Get off, you pervert!” she shrieked, letting him have it in the chest with the Harajuku bag.

That’s when the real Armenian gangsters showed up.

Two handsome young toughs stepped out of the beer-can building, doing stone-cold like they’d been practicing in the mirror. They were dressed in baggy, dark-washed jeans and expensive t-shirts embossed with those brambly, illegible MMA logos. Matching shaved heads, but the one on the right had waxed his unibrow into two halves, and the one on the left hadn’t. I didn’t see guns, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them. Anyway, the real problem was the guy behind them.

This guy was older, also Armenian, with a big, affable smile and badly dyed hair slicked into a combover that wouldn’t fool a blind man. No bling, no flash, no designer duds, just a pair of navy blue no-iron trousers, a tucked-in polo shirt and penny loafers. But the watch on his hairy wrist was sleek and understated. Not a big showy Rolex, but something infinitely more serious. I wasn’t close enough to read the face, but I’d be willing to bet it was Swiss and cost more than a house in the Valley. A Vacheron-Constantin or Parmigiani maybe. You could tell that this was the man in charge.

“Shoot that bitch,” he said, his smile never wavering. “Shoot them both.”

I swore and cranked the ignition. Of course, the Fury wouldn’t start.

“Wait,” the blackmailer said, frowning like he’d misheard. “Wait… what?”

The thug with the waxed eyebrows pulled the gun I was afraid he might have and Vika picked that moment to make like The Exorcist and let loose with a gaudy fountain of second-hand Skinny Appletini. The shooter swore and danced back from the creeping green puddle encroaching on his pristine white sneakers. The blackmailer tried to hang on to Vika’s arm but lost his grip and ended up pulling her tube dress down around her waist, releasing those astounding tits.

I cranked the ignition again. No dice. I was sweating hard, cursing the Fury, the Chrysler corporation, the long dead Walter Percy Chrysler and his mother.

The two toughs were staring, goggle-eyed, at Vika’s exposed breasts. The older man punched Waxed-Eyebrows in the ear and took the gun out of his hand, cursing him out in rapid-fire Armenian.

The older man would have shot Vika then, but she retched again, doubling over and bending at the waist as the bullet that was meant for her took out the blackmailer behind her, laying him out across the hood of his car.

Finally, the Fury started. I slammed on the gas and drove the bulky boat up over the curb and into the lot between Vika and the pissed-off Armenians. I shouldered open the driver’s-side door, hauled Vika across my lap, and burned rubber, desperately hoping the alley ahead of me wasn’t a dead end.

The guy with the unibrow dove into the open passenger-side window, hanging half-in and half-out of the car. He grabbed one of Vika’s flailing arms and a handful of her bleached hair, pulling her towards the open window. She shrieked and flailed her free arm, accidentally back-handing me. I swore and gave Unibrow an elbow to the face. It rocked him but didn’t shake him loose, so I let him have another one, this time in the unshaven throat. That did it. He dropped off the side of car, taking a fistful of Vika’s torn-out hair with him.

Vika lost a high heeled shoe, bruised legs kicking wildly and preventing the driver’s-side door from closing as I banked into a wide, fishtailing left turn. The Fury has the turning radius of an aircraft carrier, so I clipped a row of dented dumpsters and lost one of my side mirrors but somehow got the Fury’s nose pointed at the miraculously open mouth of the alley.

I shoved Vika the rest of the way into the car and over into the passenger seat. She immediately started blubbering and babbling and I raised a hand to shut her up. It didn’t completely work, just made her cry more softly. I swung out into the street, hung a squealing right and pulled my phone from my pocket, speed-dialing Penny. To hell with the hands-free law.

“What the fuck happened?” she asked as soon as she picked up the call.

“All I want to know is are you okay?” I told her.

“Fine,” she said. “They never saw me.”

“Did you…?”

“Got the whole thing on video,” she said. “Just uploaded it to the server.”

“Where are they now?”

“Just pulled out in a black Benz, heading north. I got the plates.”

I turned the Fury south at the next street.

“Penny, I love you.”

“I know,” she said and disconnected the call.

“Okay, you…” I said to Vika. “You said you have more to tell me.” I pulled over in front of a closed car dealership. “So start talking, or you can walk home from here.”

 “I’m sorry,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her.

Her skinned knees were drawn up under her puke-splattered chin. Eyes huge and raccoon-ringed. She was shaking, pale and slicked with cold sweat. She hadn’t bothered to pull her dress back up over her massive tits, but she didn’t seem to care. Any trace of sexy artifice had been sandblasted away, leaving nothing but a scared kid who was in way over her head.

“Those Armenian guys, those are the gangsters who killed your boyfriend?”

She just kept on repeating I’m sorry over and over. I wanted to interrogate her, to rip her bullshit story to pieces and try to make some kind of sense out of what just happened, but I could see that she was utterly short-circuited and useless.

This was turning into an epic clusterfuck. There was gonna be no way to keep the cops out of this one, but I still wanted to get the full story out of her first, and we weren’t exactly inconspicuous in that boat. We needed to get out of Glendale and off the street, toot fucking sweet. Against my better judgment, I took her back to my place.

* * *

Vika was passed out cold in the passenger seat by the time I got back to EchoPark, done in by adrenaline and Appletinis.

I live up Sutherland in a crappy, disintegrating building that has stubbornly resisted the neighborhood gentrification over the past decade. It had been built in the ‘30s and not aged well, but the cheap-ass landlord was able to bamboozle hapless hipsters into thinking that it was cool because it had arched windows and built-in Murphy beds. Never mind that those windows had all been painted shut fifty years ago and the beds were so rickety and dangerous that I mostly slept on my couch at the office. I only stayed there because of the cheap rent, and even then it was seeming less and less like a bargain every day.

I ended up having to carry Vika up to my second-floor apartment. She only regained consciousness long enough to puke a little green dribble down the front of my shirt. A passing neighbor, Kent I think his name is, gave me a wise, sympathetic nod. Like he knew all about woman trouble. He’s maybe twelve, but has a full beard. He probably thinks it makes him look older or wiser but really it just makes him look dirty. I was tempted to hand Vika over to him and be done with her.

Managing to get the keys out of my pocket and keep her from falling down the stairs at the same time was a challenge, but eventually I pulled it off.

My place is a studio with a bathroom but no kitchen. I don’t need a kitchen anyway, since I’m the type who could fuck up ramen. I mostly eat out or eat stuff that doesn’t call for cooking.

I man-handled her into the apartment and over to my easy chair, where she slumped like a dead thing while I got the bed down. It was musty, and the sheets needed to be changed a week ago, but she was hardly in a position to complain. Anyway, it’s not like she was particularly clean herself that night.

I flopped her across the lumpy bed and then went into the bathroom to hose down. When I came back, clad in boxers and a wife-beater, she had snuggled down under the covers and was snoring softly. Nothing to do but call it a night myself.

I didn’t realize how tired I really was until I sat down in that old, overstuffed recliner. It had been a hell of night and within minutes I was sleeping as soundly as she was.

Of course she wasn’t there when I woke up.

20.

That’s my own fault really. I hadn’t been thinking all that straight since the whole strange interlude with Kelly. I never should have brought Vika home, I should have just taken her straight to Brink.

The second I realized she was gone, I ran to the window. Sure enough, there she was, getting into a cab. She was wearing a pair of my sneakers over two pairs of my socks. They looked like clown shoes on her little feet. She didn’t look nearly as cute as Kelly had in a sexy dress and sneakers.

I knew there was no way I could make it down the stairs and out the front door in time to stop the cab, so I grabbed my phone and dialed the Bell cab company.

A woman answered, but not the one I wanted.

“Leticia’s not working today?” I asked, cursing my luck.

“No,” she said. “You want a cab or what?”

“Listen,” I said, pitching my voice low. “My wife just called for a cab on Sutherland Street in EchoPark, but she forgot to write down the address where I’m supposed to meet her later. Can you tell me the address she gave you?”

“You gotta be kidding,” the woman said. I could hear her chewing gum over the phone.

“Okay look,” I said, desperately trying to make my barely awake, coffee-less brain do its job. “We had a fight about where she was last night. I think she’s cheating on me. She’s probably going over to his house right now. Please, can’t you help me out? I just gotta know.”

“Aw, don’t worry honey,” she said. “She ain’t going over nobody’s house. She just went to the Grove. Probably needed a little retail therapy to cheer her up after your fight.”

I laughed, pumping my fist in the air and then shoving it into the rumpled sleeve of a sort-of-clean shirt,

“Well, I guess there’s no harm done,” I said. “Except to my credit card.”

 She laughed back.

“You need a cab too, honey?”

“Nah,” I said. “That’s okay. Thanks.”

I drove the Fury over to the Grove.

* * *

If you don’t know, the Grove is another one of those outdoor malls like the Americana. Except you can’t live there. Same overpriced shops, same uninspired restaurants, same blockbuster multiplex. Same narcotized consumers. There’s a reason Dawn of the Dead was set in a shopping mall.

Thing with the Grove is that it’s huge and labyrinthine. By the time I’d navigated the Fury through the multi-level parking structure and gotten down into the cheese maze, my chances of finding Vika were slim to no-fucking-way. So I did the only thing I could think of. I started chatting up the security guys, asking if they’d seen a busty blonde in a walk-of-shame club dress and too-big sneakers.

The first two were duds. One a sweet but useless black kid who really wanted to help but probably wouldn’t have noticed Elvis if he’d just walked out of the American Girls shop. The other a chilly Mexican guy who already had major issues with me before I even opened my mouth. Number three was female, also Mexican, and a little hottie, too, but working real hard to make her round, girlish face look bad-ass. She thought she’d maybe seen a chick like I described down by Victoria’s Secret, but couldn’t be sure. I got lucky with number four. Black and heavy-set, with a shaved head that had grown just enough stubble to reveal the shape of his receding hairline. Older than the first one and way more observant. He was named Lamont Stubbs, and had thick hands, pierced ears, but no earrings and a deceptively laid-back demeanor.

“Yeah, I saw her,” he told me. “Noticed her right away. Dressed like 10 pm at 10 am. Makeup all messed up. And what kind of female comes to a mall without a pocketbook?” He shrugged and put his big hands in his pockets. “She was acting all shifty and nervous, and I figured she was maybe looking to do some lifting, so I radioed Stan over in Nordstrom’s.” He indicated the entrance to the department store with his chin. “That’s where she went. About ten minutes ago.”

I fished out the last twenty in my wallet and forked it over.

“What does Stan look like?” I asked.

“Tall, skinny, white,” he said, pocketing the bill. “About six two, brown and blue. Short curly hair. Clean-shaven. Glasses. Big ears. Tattoos, but he usually keeps ‘em covered for work. Plain clothes, not uniform. I haven’t seen him yet today so I don’t know what he’s wearing, but he always wears the same black Red Wing boots.”

“Damn,” I said. “You know, if you ever get sick of working at the mall for chump change, you can come work for me for chump change. I could use an operative as sharp as you.”

“Nah,” he said with an easy grin. “I like it here. I’m out in the fresh air, pretty women walking by all day, and most of the time I don’t have to do shit.”

“Fair enough,” I said, handing him a business card. “But call me if you ever change your mind.”

I left Lamont to his girl-watching and headed into the store.

I spotted Vika’s messy blond head almost immediately, lurking in the Juniors section. It took me a second to locate Stan, but eventually found a tall guy with curly brown hair standing with his back to me, clocking Vika while pretending to peruse the sale rack. Vika had noticed that guy, too, and was nervously trying to act like she hadn’t.

When she turned her back on the tall guy, I approached him, positioning myself so a large swimsuit display was between me and Vika. I saw the boots and figured I had the right guy.

“You Stan?” I asked him. “You work security here?”

“Yeah,” he said out of the corner of his mouth, not taking his eyes off Vika. “Why?”

“I’m a private investigator,” I told him. “I’m tailing that blonde. Do me a favor and back off her ass just a little bit. I can pretty much guarantee she’s not here to shoplift, but I want her to feel like she isn’t being watched so she’ll do whatever it is that she’s planning on doing.”

He gave me a skeptical scowl.

“Look, I’m not saying don’t watch her,” I said. “Just don’t let her see you watching.”

“Okay,” he said. “But I’ll be watching you, too.”

“Good,” I replied. “It’s nice to know that somebody’s got my back. And be ready to call in the cavalry if this turns ugly.”

His scowl didn’t change, but he nodded and took a few backward steps away from me. He waited until Vika looked back over at him, then took out his phone and pretended to receive a call. Holding up his end of a fabricated conversation, he turned away from her and walked away, towards cosmetics.

Nothing happened for a few minutes. Vika just stood there looking more and more anxious, until finally she grabbed a seemingly random dress off the rack and made for the dressing rooms.

I selected the least feminine shirt I could find on short notice, hanging back until she’d gotten her little plastic tag with the number 1 on it from the lady behind the counter before following her in.

The dressing room was shaped like a blocky letter C. When you first walk in you’re in the middle of the C, a dressing room on either side of you. If those are taken you can either hang a right or a left and go down one of two short hallways, each with six more dressing rooms.  I could have had any one I wanted. The place was deserted at this hour. I could hear Vika’s voice down the left hand side.

“I’m here,” she stage whispered. “Hello?”

Then the sound of a door opening and a familiar voice.

“Where’s the tape?”

I didn’t need to look around the corner to know who Vika had come to meet. I knew that voice. I wished I didn’t, but I did. It was Kelly Gillette.

21.

“Let me see the money,” Vika said. Like she was in charge of the situation. Like she had any fucking idea who she was dealing with.

I heard the sound of a briefcase popping open, then snapping shut again.

“Okay, cool,” Vika said. “I hid the tape in this dressing room. You wait out here, and I’ll get it.”

Tape? What tape? Obviously not the tape of Vika and the supposed murder, since we didn’t get manage to get any tape during last night’s confusing fiasco. If there had ever been a tape at all.

There was a moment of quiet, and I risked a peek around the corner.

Vika was still in the dressing room, shuffling around. Kelly was standing completely still right outside the closed door, cheap brown briefcase at her feet. She was dressed in comfortable, forgettable clothes. Hair neatly braided except for one tiny wisp that had escaped on the right side. That firm, muscular ass looked better than ever in her snug black jeans. She was watching the door like a cat watching a mouse hole, holding a small, non-reflective tactical knife close to and slightly behind her right hip.

My heart felt like an adrenaline frappuccino in an industrial blender. Now I like to think I’m pretty smooth and quiet, but when I looked around the corner Kelly turned almost immediately to face me.

I had less than a millisecond to come up with something brilliant. I couldn’t think of a damn thing, so I swallowed my fear, relaxed my face into an approximation of mild, pleasant surprise and said;

“Kelly?” I hauled the corners of my leaden lips into what I hoped could pass as a genuine smile. “Man, what are the chances of running into you here?” I held the shirt up to my chest. “Hey, what do you think of this shirt? Too girly?”

Vika came out of the dressing room with a matchbox-sized digital tape in her hand. She looked over at me and was getting ready to blow the whole thing when Kelly casually backfisted her in the temple, dropping her like a wet towel. The tape fell from her slack fingers, bouncing out of its plastic case and spinning on the carpet until Vika’s unconscious tits landed on top of it.

“Shit,” Kelly said, taking a step closer to me with resignation in her voice and the knife held low and ready. “I really liked you.”

“Okay,” I said, dropping the shirt and showing my empty hands. “Hang on a minute. You don’t have to do this.”

“When I found out you never called my phone last night ...” She shook her head and took a step closer. “I was pretty pissed. I figured you were just like everyone else, giving the psycho-chick the brush off.” She let out a bitter, forced laugh that didn’t even come close to covering up all that hurt. “But that’s not it at all, is it?” Another step. “You’ve been on me this whole time.” That little half-smile curled one corner of her mouth. “That’s impressive. Makes me like you even more. Which makes me even more disappointed that I have to…”

During her whole monologue about the non-phone call, I was also listening to the lady behind the counter give a little plastic number to someone else. I was waiting to hear if that shopper was going to choose our wing of the C or the other one.

She picked ours. Remember what I said about my job being mostly luck? Well, it seemed more true than ever that day.

The shopper was one of those 89-pound plastic-surgery victims that look like Dr. Frankenstein had tried to cash in on the popularity of Bratz dolls. Duck lips. Cheek implants. Watery eyes narrowed down to squinty slits by all that torque on the overtaxed hide barely covering her skull. She was probably 107 years old, but she was about to try on a dress that Vika would think was too slutty. If she were conscious.

None of those details mattered. There was only one detail about her that was relevant to my current situation. That detail was her sweater.

It was August, currently hotter than fuck in our fair city, but since this lady had no meat on her bones, she was probably cold all the time. As a result, she was wearing this hideous over-sized mauve cardigan that had never encountered a lint-roller. It was covered with a thick layer of orange and white hair.

Cat hair.

To say that this was a long shot was the understatement of the century. Plus I’d only get one shot before Kelly used that cute little knife of hers to unzip my carotid artery. I’ve got a substantial ego, and like to think of myself as pretty bad-ass. Okay, maybe more like bad-ass adjacent, but still. Thing is, I also like myself. So much that I want to keep myself around for as long as possible. I had no illusions about being able to take Kelly in a fair fight.

So when the clueless stick-puppet wandered over to a nearby dressing room and started fumbling with the knob like there wasn’t a professional killer standing right there with a knife in her hand, my desperately flailing brain latched onto the fact I’d dug up the night before about Kelly being allergic to cats. Before I could convince myself what a terrible idea it was, I grabbed hold of the cat lady’s sweater by the back of the frayed collar and pulled down. It was so large and loose that it slipped right off her twiggy little arms, but the dress she’d been holding and the hanger it was on came with it, tangled up in the one sleeve.

“What are you, crazy?” she asked, turning slowly towards me, puffy fish-mouth open and nerve-dead face unchanged, no longer capable of expression.

Kelly stepped in and swung the knife in a tight arc that I managed to dodge by less than half an ass hair as I reached up and wrapped the sweater, cat-hair-covered side down, over her head.

“Hey!” the cat lady said, “That’s my sweater.”

Kelly took a staggering step back, swiping blind and still managing to slice open my shirt and the top of my left pec along with it. The hanger hooked to the sweater twisted and teetered against Kelly’s right shoulder and the slutty dress fell off, draping itself over her forearm and catching on the point of the knife.

Behind her, Vika was starting to pull herself up to her hands and knees, making mumbly, incoherent protests.

Behind Vika, I saw a door marked STAFF ONLY. It was ajar, the lock forced slightly out of its groove. Clearly that’s how Kelly had gotten into the dressing room without me, Stan or Vika spotting her. And a girl like Kelly never went anywhere without an exit strategy, so I was guessing that would be a way out, too.

Meanwhile, Kelly had ripped the sweater off her face and tossed it away with her left hand, shaking the dress loose from her knife hand at the same time. Her cheeks were flushed bright pink, eyes red and wet and her hair all fuzzed out and staticky.

“What the…”

Before she could say fuck, she froze. Her shoulders tensed, free hand fisting and opening as her upper lip and nose scrunched up.

She sneezed. Twice. Twice more.

I ran.

I hauled Vika to her feet and grabbed the tape, shoving it into my hip pocket and shoving Vika towards the staff door. Kelly had grabbed the briefcase and was right behind us, but she was doing a funny little cha-cha along the way. Step-step-SNEEZE-SNEEZE-SNEEZE.

On the other side of the door was a dimly lit storage room full of extra hangers and racks of rejected clothing and boxes of plastic-wrapped lingerie. I could see another open door on the other side of some more racks. I hoped it was a way out and not a closet. There was only one way to find out.

I shut the door on Kelly’s approach, but that broken lock prevented it from closing all the way. There was no time to do much more than push a rack of clothes in front of it and make a run for the other door.

Vika was wobbly and staggering, but motivated. There was no need to keep pushing her. She had gone into pure survival mode and instinctively understood the need to run.

Where we were headed turned out to be a staff toilet. A few faded magazines. A basket of potpourri that had lost most of its fake peach odor. Some not-really-funny cartoons tacked up on the walls and a passive-aggressive, handwritten sign complaining about certain people (you know who you are!) who did not put a new roll of toilet paper on the spindle after using the last of the previous roll. No way out.

Kelly was battling her way through the rack of clothes, sneezing and swearing. We needed a Plan B. I knew there had to be some sort of egress somewhere in this room. I didn’t put it past Kelly to have broken in while the store was closed and patiently waited until the arranged meet-up time, but I still had to believe that she had some kind of escape route in mind. If her plan to kill Vika had been successful, she would have needed to disappear without being spotted by security or captured on camera. But I just wasn’t seeing any way out. No way out. No…

Then I saw it.

“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I said, mostly to myself.

There was an open vent up near the ceiling on the far wall, the dusty cover hanging by only one of four screws. It looked barely big enough for my shoulders. I wasn’t so sure about Vika’s tits.

“Jesus fuck,” I said, again mostly to myself and then turned to Vika.

“We need to go through that vent,” I told her, weaving my fingers together to form a step. “You first.”

She looked back over her shoulder. Kelly was in and on her way through the maze of boxes towards us. Vika didn’t need any more encouragement.

Planting her foot on my hands, she reached for the vent as I boosted her up. Under other circumstances, I would have appreciated the fact that she wasn’t wearing panties. But in that moment all I was thinking about was living long enough to enjoy the sight of other women not wearing panties in the future.

Once her legs and floppy-sneakered feet had disappeared into the vent, I made my own attempt. Jumped and failed. I tried standing on a box of bras, but my foot went right though, crushing the flimsy cardboard and getting the straps of a slinky little leopard-print balconette tangled around my ankle.

At that point, Kelly was close enough to start swinging that knife at me again, in between fits of sneezing and knuckling allergic tears from her burning eyes. I hoisted the box of bras and tossed it at Kelly and then made one last desperate jump for the vent. Made it.

I hauled myself up into the square hole, scraping my shoulders and banging my head on the way in. I could feel Kelly tugging on the bra attached to my foot so I kicked back against her and lost both the bra and my shoe in the process.

I got the rest of myself up into the vent and started crawling on my belly. I could barely make out the pale soles of my stolen sneakers in the shaft ahead of me as Vika wormed her way along. We passed several turn-offs, but Vika kept going straight and I had no choice but to follow.

I didn’t like the way the duct was shuddering and groaning under our combined weight. I knew Kelly would probably be in right behind us. I could hear her stiffled sneezes echoing through the ventilation system. Allergies notwithstanding, the thought of having a pissed-off hitwoman crawling after me in the claustrophobic gloom with a knife in her teeth still didn’t exactly thrill me. There was no room to fight inside that dusty tube and I was very aware of my one now-bare foot, possibly only inches away from something sharp.

Those were the thoughts running through my head when the flimsy duct gave out under my weight, dumping me head-first into one of the men’s dressing rooms.

22.

The occupant of the dressing room was a dapper little gent in his early 70s. He had been trying on a Tommy Bahama shirt with a green and gray palm-frond design, but had it unbuttoned and half off when I fell out of the ceiling and landed in between him and the mirror. He looked pretty stunned by this turn of events, but was even more flabbergasted when Vika came tumbling after me. Her tube dress had been scrunched into a cumberbund, revealing both her ginormous tits and her dusty little pubic landing strip.

 “Sorry, sir,” I said, getting my feet under me and peeling off my own grubby shirt.

“Wow,” he said, eyes glued to Vika’s rack. “Are you okay?”

“Fine.”

I pulled Vika up and draped my shirt over her shoulders, pulling her dress down to cover her snatch.

“Button up,” I told her, wiping my filthy hands on my undershirt.

She did what I said while I looked up and surveyed the damage in the ceiling. The broken duct had twisted and folded, jagged edges like teeth blocking Kelly from following us. I gave the dressing room a quick once-over and spotted a straw stingy-brim hat sitting on the bench to my left. I picked it up and put it on Vika’s head. It was a little too big for her, nearly covering her eyes. Which was a good thing.

“Do you mind if we borrow this?” I asked the older man.

“Go ahead,” he said, shaking his head with a disbelieving smile.

Vika leaned in, tipped the hat back, and kissed his cheek.

“Thanks,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

“You got it, honey,” he said with a wink.

Amazing how certain primitive instincts never falter, even under the direst, most dangerous circumstances. Fight or flight. The drive to protect your offspring at all costs. Vika's ability to play men was like that.

We left the men’s dressing room, ignoring the confused protests from a young Asian guy on his way in with three pairs of neon swimming trunks, none of which looked like a good idea. I held Vika’s arm in a firm grip, walking slow and casual as we made our way towards the door. Every tall guy I saw looked like Stan, but when I finally spotted the real Stan, he was over by the women’s dressing room being distracted by the hysterical cat lady.

We got the hell out of there.

I still wasn’t gonna let go of Vika’s arm for a second. We were Siamese fucking twins until I got some answers out of her.

We made it to the Fury and out of the parking structure without incident. I drove south on Fairfax, a heavy silence between us. Vika was curled up in the shotgun seat with the old man’s hat pulled down low over her eyes. I was pretty sure she was crying.

Finally, I’d had it. I pulled onto a service road near the oil pumps at Stocker and La Cienega, parking next to a sagging chain-link fence overlooking a steep drop. I left the engine running, just in case the fucker didn’t feel like starting again.

“First of all,” I said. “Give me back my fucking sneakers.”

She sheepishly removed the shoes and handed them over. I pulled off my single, now-widowed dress shoe and tossed it out the window.

“Now’d be a good time to start talking,” I told Vika, lacing the sneakers.

She pushed the hat back on her head and swiped at the tears making clean streaks through her ruined makeup.

“I don’t know where to start.”

I touched my hip pocket.

“Start with what’s on this tape.”

“Oh God,” she said. “This is so fucked up.”

“I don’t need you to tell me that, kid,” I told her. “Just start at the beginning and tell me everything else.”

“Okay,” she said in a small voice. “Well, that tape isn’t the tape that fat loser said he was gonna show Tony’s dad.”

“Who’s Tony?”

“My boyfriend. Kinda ex-boyfriend.” She shrugged. “Whatever. He’s the Armenian Power guy who got killed.”

“And his father is the guy with the combover who tried to shoot you last night?”

She nodded.

“That’s Haro Yaghyazarian,” she said, like she couldn’t believe I didn’t know him. “Don’t tell my parents about me and Tony, okay? My dad will totally lose it if he ever found out I’d been with a guy like that.”

“At this point, you have way bigger problems than getting grounded by your parents. Keep talking.”

“Anyway, I think maybe that stupid jerk didn’t even have a tape,” she told me like it had just occurred to her. I was ahead of her there. “Okay, so maybe he saw what happened on the balcony that night because he was like, peeping on me or something, but I bet he never had any camera. I think he just wanted to trick me so he could get my money and then still turn me over to Tony’s dad for even more money. And you know what? I’m not sorry he got shot.”

I was gonna comment on the astounding stupidity of agreeing to give someone 20K in exchange for a theoretical tape of footage that you had never even seen, but the stupidity was probably gonna keep on coming so I kept my opinions to myself.

“Focus,” I told her. “What’s on the tape that I have?”

“That’s Angie’s,” she said. “I mean Angie’s on the tape. You see, she had this famous client who paid extra to shoot a video of one of their sessions.”

“Not Kelly?”

Vika shook her head.

“Kelly was just a decoy. She booked the sessions for her boss so there would be no record of the real client. Because if people found out that her boss was a total kinky lesbo, it would it be, like, this huge media thing.”

Well, that figured, and fit in nicely with some of my own theories.

“So anyway,” Vika continued without stopping for breath. “The client’s married and her hubby has this massive heart attack while she’s in the middle of her little video shoot. She has to rush off to be by his side in the hospital all wifely and devoted in front of the TV cameras so nobody would suspect she’s not really into that guy. She was in such a rush that she totally forgot the POV camera with the tape still in it.

“When I went over to pick up the last of the 20 grand, Angie told me what happened with the camera. I was like hello! This is like a million dollars right here. We could run away together and live in, like, France, or something and never see Haro Yaghyazarian again. She was so not into it, and begged me not to take the tape, but I figured she was just being a big baby and she’d get over it when we were chilling on one of those fancy topless beaches they have over there with all the sexy French guys, like, waiting on us hand and foot.”

“Your sister died because you took that tape,” I said.

“Well… yeah but… I totally did it for us.” She looked away across the oil fields below. “Angie would have wanted me to have the money.” The waterworks started up again, but not for Angie. “Now it’s all fucked. Now I’m not gonna get anything.”

I have yet to put my hands on a woman who didn’t swing first, but I have to say, I was pretty fucking tempted in that moment. Anyway I didn’t want to knock her out before she answered my next question.

“Who’s the client?” I asked.

She never did get a chance to answer.

23.

Next thing I knew I had a pack of pristine black Benzes pinning the Fury to the droopy fence. One ahead, one behind and one on my side, far enough away that I could still open my door, but not all the way. If I’d been less fixated on trying not to slap the shit out of Vika, I might have noticed them before it was too late.

The passenger door of the Mercedes on my left opened and our pal Haro got out. He was dressed almost identically to the night before, except for a slight color variation in the shirt. When he put his right hand on the frame of my missing window, I got a nice close-up view of the expensive watch. It was, in fact, a Vacheron-Constantin. Rose gold with a brown alligator band and several smaller calendar dials that showed the date, days of the week, and a miniature sun moving across the sky to represent the time of day. Being right about the watch didn’t make me feel any better about this impromptu meeting.

“Some advice,” he said. “It is just my opinion.” He shrugged. “But maybe you should drive a less obvious car.”

His confidence was astounding. If I were armed, I could have shot him in the face before his goons could do a thing about it, but he was utterly unconcerned. It was hot, but he was not sweating. His face was relaxed, friendly. His body language comfortable and loose, like it was all no big deal. Like we were just a couple of casual acquaintances passing the time with small talk.

“Nice watch,” I said.

He looked down at his wrist.

“You like it?” He smiled. “I am a watchmaker by trade, like my father and my grandfather. This job, it suits me. I find great beauty in precision. Sadly, my only son did not feel the same way.”

Vika scrunched down in the seat beside me, whimpering.

“I had hoped,” Haro continued. “With time he might mature into the kind of man I could be proud of. The kind of man who could appreciate a fine watch like this. But now, thanks to your little friend over there, that will never happen.”

I frowned. Looked over at Vika and then back at Haro.

“What?”

“I swear I didn’t mean to do it,” Vika said, gripping my arm. “You gotta believe me. I never touched a gun before in my life, like ever. I picked it up and it… it just went off! I only meant to scare him, I didn’t mean to kill anyone.” She let go of my arm and covered her face. “I just wanted him to stop hitting me.”

“Aw, shit,” I said, throwing up my hands. “Look, man, I had no idea. She told me she was just a witness.”

“This girl,” he said. “You know that she is not a good person. It would be best for everyone involved if you just let us take her.”

I looked back over at Vika. She had dropped her hands into her lap and was looking up at me with wet, scared eyes like a pathetic shelter dog about to take the long walk to the euthanasia room. Working me, giving me everything she had left in the manipulation tank. Haro was right. She was not a good person. But even a bad person didn’t deserve whatever fate awaited Vika in the chilly leather interior of that Mercedes. Or did she?

Was I really willing to piss off the Armenian mob in order to protect a selfish little monster like Vika? Vika, who had played me from minute one. Who let her own sister die for money. But on the other hand, if I turned her over and turned a blind eye to murder, what kind of person did that make me? It was a hell of a choice.

“Okay,” I told Haro. “Have your guy in front pull up a few feet and I’ll turn the car so you can open the passenger-side door.”

He frowned, suspicious.

“Not enough so I can drive away,” I said. “Just enough so you can get her out of the car.”

“No, please…” Vika began.

“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped. “I’ve heard all the bullshit I’m gonna hear outta you.”

Vika shut the fuck up, eyes huge and lower lip quivering.

“You got me penned in here,” I told Haro. “Even if the car in front pulls up, I still won’t be able to get this boat past your car on the left.

Haro looked at me, thoughtful and curious for a moment, then nodded and signaled the guy in the lead car to pull up. Which the guy did, about three feet.

I slammed the Fury into gear and stomped on the gas before the guy ahead of me stopped rolling, wrenching the wheel to the right, away from Haro. I clipped the bumper of the lead Mercedes, muscling it forward with the sheer weight of all that American steel and then bulldozed through the rusty, sagging chain-link on my right.

It wasn’t exactly a sheer cliff alongside the service road, but it was a pretty steep slope, and the Fury skidded and shimmied down the rocky hillside like it was finally gonna shake itself to pieces. Rocks of various sizes joined in the fun, bouncing and rolling along with us, occasionally ricocheting off the dented doors and roof. It didn’t help that we also had angry gangsters shooting at us, bullets pinging off the Fury’s shuddering frame.

I risked a look in the rearview and saw Haro standing at the top of the hill, flanked by two shooters in mirrored shades and black suits. These guys were infinitely more serious than the young knuckleheads he had with him at the Glendale meet up. It was hard to tell by the expression on his face if he was impressed by my audacity or astounded by my stupidity. I wasn’t so sure either.

Seconds later a bullet spiderwebbed the rear windshield, cracks obscuring my view of whatever was going on up there. It didn’t matter anyway. I was much more concerned with what was going on in front of me, like the giant black oil pump I was about to run into.

Wrestling the wheel, I took out the fence around the pump but managed to miss the pump itself by a few meager inches. I hadn’t even noticed that one of the Mercedeses had come barreling down the hill behind me until it slammed into my bumper, goosing me ahead and to the left.

More slaloming down another even steeper slope, and then I hit a padlocked gate, wrenching it from its hinges and dragging it with us, hung up on the Fury’s bent wipers for several minutes before it slid off to one side, taking one of the wipers with it. That led me to an unpaved service road that eventually dead-ended several turns later. The Mercedes was still on my ass, scratched and dented but looking infinitely less battered and near-death than my Fury. I gunned it through a thicket of dry brush, over a hill and down into the middle of honking, swerving traffic on South La Brea.

The Mercedes came out of the brush right behind me, barely missing a low-end Lexus but T-boning the minivan behind it. I swerved and skated ahead of the pile up behind the crash, the Fury’s left flank kissing an airport shuttle van and clipping off my one remaining side mirror.

The Fury had at least three flat tires, and steam was pouring out from under the dented hood. I had to get it off the road. I managed to turn onto a quiet side street and pull over in front of a small house with a FOR SALE sign on the neatly mowed lawn just as the cracked front axle finally gave out completely. I patted the Fury’s dashboard, silently apologizing. That car made me nuts, but it still didn’t deserve to die like this.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” I said to Vika, who was curled up near-fetal against the glove box. “Pronto.”

That’s when I noticed the perfect little hole in the crown of the old man’s borrowed hat. I pushed Vika back against the seat, revealing the big, showy exit wound in her forehead.

She was as dead as the Fury. And I was fucked.

24.

This was the worst possible outcome. The worst of both worlds. I’d pissed off a guy like Haro Yaghyazarian in order to save someone who probably didn’t deserve to be saved, and now here she was, dead anyway. I thought being a gentleman sucked before. I had no fucking idea how bad it could really get.

First thing I needed to do was get the hell away from the car and the body. I looked down at my watch, but it too had ended its life at some point during that crazy headlong race through the oil fields. The glass had been shattered by the glancing kiss of a passing bullet, the face beneath unreadable. All I could do was hope that I got lucky with the always unpredictable bus schedule.

On my jog to the nearest busline, I gave Brink a buzz and told her where to pick up the stiff. Unsurprisingly, she was not thrilled with my refusal to come down to the station and provide an explanation.

“Trust me,” I told her. “I’m just a few hours away from being able to wrap not just this case, but two other murders. Including my little lost femme. I’ll tie em all up with a big bow and hand em over to you like a big fat birthday present. I just need a little more time.”

“My birthday was back in May,” she said. “And would you mind explaining how turning a closed OD into an active homicide is any kind of present for anybody in this department?”

“It will be because I’m gonna give you your perp on a fucking platter. Can you just trust me on this, Brink? Please?”

“I oughta have my fucking head examined…” she began.

“I owe you one,” I cut in. “Gotta run.”

I ended the call just in time to catch the 212 into Hollywood. This is a car city, so our mass transit system really sucks. It’s useless for getting from place to place with anything resembling speed or efficiency, but it’s an excellent way to disappear when you need to get off the street.

The way-longer-than-it-needed-to-be ride back to EchoPark gave me plenty of time to think, about what I’d gotten myself into and how I was gonna get out of it. I needed to find out who was on the tape currently burning a hole in my hip pocket, but I was also fairly certain that I would have men whose last names end in -an waiting for me at my apartment and my office.

I decided to make a ballsy, pro-active and possible suicidal move. I called up Haro Yaghyazarian.

Of course his cell was unlisted, but I found his watch shop in Glendale and explained to the nice girl who answered the phone that her boss would want to speak to me. When she asked why I told her:

“Because I’ve got the corpse of the woman who murdered his son in the passenger seat of my car.”

That got me a few looks from my fellow passengers, but not as many as you’d think. People who take the bus in L.A. are used to crazy. They’re also used to minding their own business.

She took down my number and told me that Mr. Yaghyazarian would call me back right away. I had a passing moment where I thought maybe I shouldn’t give out my cell number to a guy who wanted me dead, but I was kidding myself if I thought he didn’t have it already.

The nice girl was right. My phone buzzed in my hand less than a minute later.

“Ms. Fatale,” Haro said. “I must say I’m surprised to hear from you.”

“Vika is dead,” I told him.

“Surely you must have realized that this outcome was inevitable.”

“I’m not sorry she’s dead,” I said. “But I still couldn’t let you take her.” I looked out the greasy, graffitied bus window at the passing city. People just going about their lives like any other day. “She may have been a bad person, but I’m not.”

“I think your choice was foolish,” he told me. “But, I suppose you must do what you feel is right. However…” I could hear the scritch of a lighter and a sharp inhale. “You have created a somewhat awkward situation between you and I.”

“I realize that,” I said. “So I want to make a deal.”

There was a long pause. I could hear him smoking. He covered the phone and spoke some muffled Armenian, then came back on the line.

“Yes,” he finally said. “I am listening.”

This was where things could really go south in a major way. But I didn’t see any other choice.

“I have no personal beef with you,” I told him. “But I am gonna have to take this mess to the cops at some point.” Silence on the other end. I had no idea where I stood but kept talking anyway. “Give me one of your men. Someone I can finger as the shooter for both Vika and the black kid. Someone you trust to do the time with their mouth shut. I promise I’ll leave your name out of it. They’ll question you, of course, in connection with your son’s death, but I’m sure you can handle it.”

More silence, then;

“I am waiting for the deal part.”

“The deal part is I leave you out of it, and you leave me alive.”

“That doesn’t seem like such a great deal. You would also leave me out of it if you were dead, wouldn’t you?”

“There’s a bonus.”

“A bonus?”

“The bonus is that the video footage I have of you shooting the black kid in Glendale never gets seen by anyone but me.”

Silence again, just an inhale and an exhale.

“If I don’t type in the delay code every day, the footage gets automatically uploaded to the LAPD, the L.A. Times and CNN. If I’m dead, there’s nothing you can do to stop that footage from going public.”

That was a lie, of course, and not my best work, but it was all that was standing between my ass and a bullet.

“So you claim to be a good person,” he said. “Yet you resort to blackmail?”

“It’s not blackmail,” I said. “I’m not asking for money, I’m doing you a favor. And all I’m asking in return is that you let me walk away.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” I looked down at my broken watch. “Well, actually, one of your guys shot my watch. Think you can fix it?”

He laughed, a warm and genuine laugh made deeply creepy by the fact that I still had no idea if he was going to kill me or not.

“You are a surprising woman in many ways, Ms. Fatale,” he said. “I will let you live, but not because of your so-called deal. I will let you live because the world is more interesting with you in it. But I will now ask you a favor.”

“Shoot,” I said, realizing the second it was out that it had been a really bad choice of words.

“Do not do anything to make me change my mind.”

He ended the call without saying goodbye.

When I got to my EchoPark office, several transfers and over an hour later, I was utterly exhausted in every way. I still made myself case the building thoroughly before going anywhere near it. Slow and wary, I slipped in through the back door and meticulously searched every inch of Penny’s front office and my own. Empty. Penny’s desk had a note neatly folded so that it stood up in the center of her spotless blotter. It read BACK SOON.

Nobody was waiting to kill me, but there was an unmarked manila envelope on my desk. Inside, I found a photo and a red watch box.

The photo was of a stoic young Armenian man with a broken nose who was apparently named Karen. Karen Gamburyan, according to the handwriting on the back of the photo. His height and weight were also provided, along with his address and phone number. This was clearly Haro’s fall guy. The shooter I was supposed to claim that I saw kill Vika and the blackmailer. He wasn’t anybody I recognized. I committed his details to memory and burned the photo.

Inside the watch box I found a vintage Tag Heuer Monaco from the ‘70s. The same bulky square watch that Steve McQueen wore in the movie Le Mans. An extremely expensive joke about my race-car driving skills. I threw my own broken watch away but I couldn’t bring myself to wear the new one. I had no idea how to feel about a gift like that from such a genial, murderous man. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the deal I had made with him either. Not like I had a choice, but still. Was I really the good person I claimed to be?

I stashed the watch in a desk drawer, got the cut on my chest cleaned and bandaged, and then did some quick digging around Karen Gamburyan. Low-level enforcer, a few arrests, but nothing that stuck. A Mixed Martial Artist with a 7-1 record and, surprisingly, a not-half-bad painter. Portraits of fighters, mostly, but also a few really powerful abstract images. A pretty wife named Briana and infant daughter Mimi, who would undoubtedly be very well provided for while hubby did time for his boss. I also found out that his name was pronounced CAR-en, like the thing you drive, not like the American female name that was spelled the same way. But in the end, I stopped digging, because I didn’t want to know about any of this. In fact, the less I knew the better.

Plus I still had that little tape burning a hole in my hip pocket. I was dying to know what was on there.

25.

Penny still wasn’t back from wherever she’d gone and I didn’t want to mess with her machines, which she had set up in her own unique and arcane way and changed almost daily. I swear she does it just to make me ask her how it works. Like she needs to do shit like that to make herself invaluable to my operation. She ought to know that I can’t function without her. Anyway, I couldn’t be bothered to try and decipher her latest configuration in order to watch the footage on the big screen, so I just popped the tape into a spare camera, flipped open the little screen, and hit play.

Like Vika said, it was Angie on the tape. It was both disturbing and heartbreaking to see her looking so vivacious and bubbly and alive. Like she had no idea what was coming.

The client was laying on the bed, wearing the POV camera rig, so I couldn’t see her face. What I could see what she was looking at. Which, unsurprisingly, was tits.

Angie was wearing a white vintage panty-girdle, beige full-fashioned stockings and chunky white heels. I could see her thick, natural bush through the sheer, springy girdle material. Her black hair was piled up in a ‘50’s updo, her sweetly smiling lips painted a deep, matte red. And those tits.

Viewed from below they were absolutely breathtaking. Wobbling gently as she moved, reaching towards the camera to pinch the cheek of the camera wearer. She had fat chocolate nipples topping areolas so big you couldn’t possibly get a whole one in your mouth. But, man, would it be fun to try.

She was talking baby talk to the camera wearer.

“Who’s mommy’s wittle bittie baby girl?” she was cooing softly. “Yes you are. You’re mommy’s cutie pootie princess, aren’t you?”

I was leaning in to the little screen, listening carefully for any kind of name or hint at the client’s identity when a high, screechy wail from the camera-wearer frazzed the mike and made me jump a little.

“Aw,” Angie said. “What the matter with my wittle precious baby boo? Does baby have a messy poo-poo diaper?”

Thank fuck, she didn’t. That was really the last thing I wanted to see. However, as Angie reached under the big white diaper to check, the camera wearer looked down at her own body. I hit pause.

What I could see of the client revealed that she was thick-set and older. From the neatly manicured hand I could see clutching a pink plastic rattle, I made her somewhere in her early fifties. Around the same age as Vivian Lane. In this city, where botox and plastic surgery are as common as tacos, hands are the most reliable indicator of a woman’s age. I noticed that she was not wearing her wedding ring, but I could see the band of paler skin where it normally sat. She was mostly naked, aside from the diaper and some pink frilly booties on her distant, waving feet. She didn’t have much in the way of tits herself, and carried her weight primarily in her midsection. Freckles on her tan chest. All good details to file away, but nothing that stood out as memorable and unique. No tattoos, no scars, no unusual features that would help to ID her if she were a headless corpse. If this was all I had, I still wouldn’t be able to pick her out of a line-up. I needed to see her face. I pressed play, figuring it must be visible somewhere further into the footage. After all, Angie died because of this tape.

“I know,” Angie said on the tape. “Mommy’s poor wittle bitty baby is hungwy.”

She hefted those magnificent jugs in both hands, leaning in and offering them to the client. The client dropped the rattle and reached up to give them a healthy squeeze, making appallingly bad adult approximations of happy baby noises.

“Okay, sugar bunny,” Angie said, sitting down on the bed and pulling the client across her lap. She cradled the camera wearer with one arm and used the other hand to guide a nipple into the mouth beneath the lens. 

Then something unexpected. A blurry shuffle and a little blip of dead tape. When the camera started up again, it was on Angie’s head. The money shot.

Angie was looking down at the cradled client, who was furiously sucking one breast while kneading the other with her ringless hand. This was exactly what I needed to see.

She was wearing a pink lacy baby bonnet that hid her hair, but her eyebrows were pale and mostly plucked away. No makeup. Eyes wide and blue, surrounded by thin, colorless eyelashes. Botox “bunny lines” around the bridge of her neatly bobbed button nose. Collagen-enhanced lips locked around Angie’s nipple. Her expression was disturbingly blank, her empty gaze a vacuum of howling, bottomless need.

But who was she? Her taut, surgically sculpted face was generic and vaguely familiar, like a less-successful morning show host or a downwardly mobile, aging newscaster relegated to doing adoptable-pet-of-the-week segments. It was hard to tell if she looked familiar because everyone around here uses the same plastic surgeon, or because I’d seen her face before.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. Penny. I hit pause and answered.

“I got Kelly’s employer,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the cybergymnastics I had to pull, but I got her.”

“I’m looking at her right now,” I said. “On a tape shot by Angie during their last, off-the-books session. She looks real familiar, but I can’t quite place her face.”

“You’re gonna love this,” Penny said.

“Spill, you tease.”

“Helen White.”

I frowned and squinted at the screen.

“Who?”

“Senator Helen White,” Penny said. “Republican. Conservative. Christian. Adamant supporter of DOMA, Prop 8 and the Alliance Defense Fund.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Because I’m watching video footage of Senator Helen White wearing a diaper and sucking Angie’s tits.”

Penny snickered.

“Brilliant,” she said. “But you know what? I’m not even a little bit shocked. Okay, so it’s less common with the ladies, but seriously, what is it with right wingers getting busted with same-sex prostitutes? It happens so often these days it would almost seem more shocking if it were revealed that one of them is genuinely straight.”

I laughed, too, but then felt it die inside me halfway through.

“Penny, there’s way more to this case than just outing yet another conservative politician for laughs. Angie’s dead because she made this tape and wouldn’t give it back. Helen White isn’t just a hypocrite, she’s a murderer.”

“Jeez, you’re right,” Penny said. “What are we going to do?”

“Fuck if I know,” I said. “How soon can you get your ass back to the office?”

“I’m on the Westside,” she said. “40 minutes, minimum. If I get lucky.”

“Shit,” I said. “Try Pico.”

“I’m on it,” she said. “I’ll get there when I get there.”

She rang off. I put the phone down on my desk and looked at the paused frame of baby Helen White. This was way bigger and more fucked up than I ever could have imagined. Yet at the same time it was also profoundly personal. Personal for Mickey, who had lost the love of her life and personal for me, because knowing Kelly was Helen White’s pet killer didn’t change the way I felt about her.

I tried to lay it all out in my head, step by step. Angie gets the call from Vika, saying she shot her gangster boyfriend (accidentally or otherwise), and now she’s being blackmailed by someone claiming to have videotaped the murder. Angie agrees to go back to tricking to help Vika pay off the blackmailer and in the process gets hired by Kelly. Only Kelly’s not really the trick, it’s her boss, Senator Helen White. On that last day, Angie’s last day, the one with no dates on the books, the senator must have contacted her directly and made arrangements for that video shoot. Only Helen’s lavender hubby pulls a grabber, and she has to rush to the hospital to be photographed by his side, forgetting the POV camera and that damning tape. Vika gets the not-so-clever idea to steal the tape and blackmail the senator, so Angie gets a visit from Kelly and a hotshot to silence her forever. Mickey hires me to find out what happened and, well, that’s where you came in.

I watched the rest of the tape, just to be thorough. Not much else worth mentioning, other than being subjected to several minutes of Helen jacking off, rubbing one out through the thick diaper while Angie cuddled and nursed her. Then an apologetic and embarrassed Kelly popping into frame with the bad news about hubby’s heart attack. Then a dizzying scramble and blur, followed by black, blank nothing.

I still didn’t have an answer for Penny about what we should do next. I mean, sure, we had the ability to destroy Helen’s career and credibility, but that just wasn’t enough for me. We needed hard, irrefutable evidence that Helen had paid Kelly to kill Angie. Just because I was sure that’s how it had gone down, didn’t mean that it would stand up in court. Of course, I could just pass what I knew onto Mickey and let her and her homies handle the situation, East Los style.

In that moment, I was all out of brilliant ideas. But I’d like to think I might have eventually come up with something at least semi-plausible if, at that moment, I hadn’t gotten sapped from behind and knocked out cold.

26.

When I came to, I was naked and bound to a comfortable, expensive dining room chair. But I wasn’t in a dining room. I was in some kind of low-ceilinged utility room or shed. Or maybe part of a stable, since I could smell horses even though I couldn’t see or hear them. The room was empty except for me and my chair and some built-in cabinets on the far wall. There was one door to my left and a single window to the right, its small panes whitewashed and opaque. My shoes, clothes, phone and other personal possessions were nowhere to be seen. I had the world’s most uncoordinated clog-dancers practicing inside my skull.

I gave my bondage a systematic test. Ankles bound separately to the legs of the chair, left to left and right to right. Waist cinched to the back of the chair. Hands tied together behind my back and it felt like they were linked to the rope around my waist, which tightened when I tried to move my hands. I was twisting my wrists and stretching my fingers to find the knot when Kelly walked into the room.

She was in her work clothes again. Lean, tailored black trouser suit and a crisp white shirt, first two buttons open. Jacket unbuttoned, a slim, barely discernable bulge under her left arm. Gloves again, but not driving gloves. Solid black leather, no holes for the knuckles. These gloves were made for an entirely different kind of job.

“This is the part where you say that I shouldn’t kill you,” she said. “Because you thought we had something special.”

That stung. I looked up at her.

“Didn’t we?”

“I was just a job to you,” she said. “Now you’re just a job to me.”

“At first, maybe,” I said. “But if all I cared about was using you to get to Helen, I would’ve worked you a lot harder. Made love to you and made you trust me, and then opened you up like an oyster. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Remember?”

She frowned, just a faint flicker of doubt passing over her face, but I grabbed hold of it like a life preserver.

“I know you’re gonna kill me no matter what,” I told her. “But don’t let me die thinking that I was the only one who felt anything last night. Give me that, at least.”

She looked down at her hands, then away, silent for a few seconds. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. She was so fucking beautiful to me, even then. Her crow’s feet and her tough chin and those vigilant green eyes. Remembering her taste, her body against mine. Even knowing she was there to kill me, her closeness still got to me.

“Nothing personal,” she finally said.

“Nothing personal?” I asked. “Kelly, look me in the eye and tell me that.”

“Shut up,” she snapped. “Would you just shut up?”

“I’m not going to shut up until you kill me,” I said. “So what are you waiting for?”

“Helen,” she said. “She wants to be here.”

“She wants to be here?” I shook my head. “She wants to watch you kill me? And you’re okay with that?”

“I told you,” she replied. “It’s just a job.”

“Right.”

Neither one of us said anything for a minute. Of course it was me who broke the silence.

“Why Helen White?” I said.

“What?”

“I just don’t get it,” I said. “What self-respecting dyke would take money from a closeted hater like Helen White?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Your boss fought tooth and nail against the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. As a soldier, a veteran, that doesn’t bother you at all?”

She let out a bitter, derisive snort.

“Don’t talk to me about gay rights,” she said. “You were over there. You saw the shit that went down. There’s no such thing as rights in this rotten world. Not for us, not for anyone. Anybody who thinks they have rights is kidding themselves. You know who has rights? Whoever has the biggest fucking gun.”

“Or whoever has the dough to hire the biggest fucking gun.”

More silence. More waiting. I kept myself occupied by secretly working the knot that bound my wrists. Testing every side, every angle. It was tight, but not so tight that I couldn’t tease it slowly apart. Given enough time.

“How much longer are we gonna have to wait?” I asked.

Kelly shrugged.

“Well, my hands are tied,” I continued. “So poker is out. What do you think we should do pass the time.”

“Shut up, willya?”

“With me being all naked and helpless like this,” I said, leaning forward and spreading my legs a little wider. “You could pretty much have your way with me. You could do anything you wanted, and there’d be nothing I could do to stop you.”

“You want me to gag you?”

“Yes, please,” I said. “Mistress.”

“Oh, for fuck sake,” she said, but I could see a hint of a smile that told me I was getting to her.

“Or you could shut me up another way,” I said.

She looked at me then and goddamn, it was all still there. Everything I’d seen in her eyes the night before. Everything I felt. Everything. I knew she had a gun, and was probably gonna use it, but I still wanted her. And I knew she still wanted me.

She took a step closer to me, gaze locked with mine. The air was heavy with the smell of horses and the salty tang of the ocean, but her smell was there too, teasing and faint like familiar music playing in another apartment. Every inch of my exposed and vulnerable skin ached for her. A hot pulse curled like a fist inside my cunt.  

Have you ever felt that kind of crazy, end-of-the-world desire where you know it’s a terrible idea, probably the worst you’ve ever had, but you can’t think about anything else? Where you know that no good will ever come of the way you feel about that person, because you have no possible future together, no chance for it to end any way but ugly, but you still can’t help falling for them in that moment?

Then Helen White showed up like a cold shower, and that moment was lost forever.

27.

Helen Fucking White, in the flesh. She wasn’t wearing a diaper and a bonnet. She was dressed, unsurprisingly, for horseback riding. Western, not English. All-American, of course, just like she was. Because Senator Helen White didn’t go for that stuck-up, elitist European crap. She may be a multi-millionaire, but she wanted her constituents to know that she was just like folks in her Wrangler jeans, simple Western shirt, and scuffed cowboy boots. No cowboy hat, though, because that would have messed up her expensively coiffed blond hair. Her surgically sculpted face was heavily but flawlessly made up, the kind of smooth, fake-tan mask the pros construct to hide your imperfections from the unforgiving eye of an HD camera.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said, brushing dust from her jeans with gloved hands. “But the shoot ran long.” She shrugged and smiled apologetically, like we’d just been waiting on some dull policy meeting. “You know how it is with TV crews. They tell you an hour, but really it’s more like three. Anyway, we’re all here now.”

“Helen, listen,” Kelly began, palms out.

“Just a second,” she said, seeming distracted as she opened the dusty, etched-glass door of first one built-in cabinet, then another. “I swear I can never remember where anything is anymore. One of the many indignities of aging.”

“Listen,” Kelly said again, taking a step closer to Helen. “I ... I just don’t feel right about this.”

“Ah, here we are,” Helen said, having found what she was looking for.

She turned around and shot Kelly in the head.

Kelly was fast, but she wasn’t that fast. She died with her hand on the grip of her side arm.

When Kelly went down, I let out a sharp, involuntary sound. A truncated shout of both fear and anger, wrenching my wrists furiously against the rope.

“Fuck,” I said. Probably the most common last word in the English-speaking world. I was determined to make sure I got a few other words in first. “What the hell did you do that for?”

“Oh, come on,” Helen said, laying her pistol on the cement floor near my chair. “Isn’t it your job to figure out things like this? You tell me why the hell I did that.”

I looked down at the gun and then back up at Helen. I couldn’t look at Kelly. No space in my head to deal with how I felt about that. All I could do was keep on working that knot.

“Okay, okay,” I said, groping for connections, spurring my brain like a reluctant horse. “So you knew that Angie’s death was going to be ruled a homicide and you needed a fall guy. I mean girl.”

“That was already set,” she said. “I didn’t give anyone a hotshot, Kelly did. No one knows that I ever had anything to do with that girl.” She bent down over the body and took something from Kelly’s trouser pocket. “Nobody who hasn’t seen this tape.”

She held up the little tape, then turned and set it on one of the shelves inside the built-in cabinets. I was still working my wrists, working that knot. It didn’t help that my hands were starting to tingle, fingers getting clumsy and numb.

“So I walk into my stables, and what do I find? A filthy, perverted sex game gone horribly wrong. Of course, I’m appalled. How could I have allowed someone like that into my trusted inner circle? A homosexual and a murderer!” She made her already wide, permanently surprised eyes even wider and more surprised, faux-shocked hand to her chest. “Because, as we all know, one kind of deviant behavior leads directly to others. Which is why the gays can never be allowed to run rampant, shoving their twisted agenda down the throats of clean, decent Americans.”

“Clean, decent Americans like you?”

“I’m not perfect,” she said with a phony, sanctimonious smile. “Just forgiven. My own sins are between me and the Lord. But anyway, that’s not the point.”  

“Then what is the point?” I asked. Desperate to keep her talking. I almost had that knot. Almost…

She bent over Kelly’s body again.

“The point is,” she said, peeling Kelly’s dead fingers off her side arm and pulling it free from its holster. “I don’t need Kelly to take the fall for Angie’s murder.”

She raised the gun and drew a bead right between my eyes.

“I need her to take the fall for yours.”

28.

I almost had that knot, but almost wasn’t good enough. I threw my weight to the left as hard as I could, just as the gat in Helen’s hand spat fire. Her bullet sailed through the space where my head had been milliseconds before and shattered the painted-over window. I fell on my side on the concrete floor, taking the chair with me. That jolt echoed through my bones and my aching head, but it wrenched the slackening rope around my wrists the extra quarter-inch that allowed me to slip free.

I knew it was a bad idea to put my prints on the gun that had killed Kelly. After all, that was Helen’s plan, to put that gun in my dead hand and frame me for murder. But Mike Hammer probably wasn’t gonna show up and make with the .44 caliber justice any time soon, so I figured I’d better go with what I had.

I grabbed that gun and took my best shot at that psycho bitch. Unfortunately, my hands were completely numb and useless, fingers like frozen sausages. I somehow managed to shove one of them through the trigger guard and squeeze, but the shot went wide.

Wide, but still lucky. Maybe I ought to change my name to Lucky Fatale.

The bullet hit the open cabinet door to Helen’s right. Shards of etched glass flew every which way, ricocheting off the walls and making Helen raise her gun hand to shield her face. A guitar-pick-sized chunk buried itself in the back of Helen’s hand, causing her to yelp and drop the gun.

The gun bounced and slid in my direction. I rolled myself onto my belly and reached for it with the dead paddle that had replaced my left hand. No dice. Helen pulled the glass shard out of her hand and took a cautious step towards me. I changed her mind with a bullet. Another laughably wide shot that ricocheted off the floor beside her right cowboy boot and hit the elderly electrical outlet behind her, causing an explosion of sparks and blue flame. She danced back, boots crunching on glass, then turned and fled.

As the eager flames started climbing the dry, dusty wall and filling the room with choking smoke, I got myself turned over and untied as quickly as I could. But once I was free, I wasted precious seconds crouching over Kelly’s body. Sad and angry and wishing things could have been different.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Useless, meaningless words, but there was no time to think of anything better.

Outside the room, I heard Helen’s screechy, hysterical voice.

“She’s crazy! She killed my driver! And she’s got a gun!”

I needed to get gone, and I’m talking five minutes ago. But I needed that tape even more. I was also gonna need to take the incriminating gun with me so I could ditch it as soon as an opportunity presented itself.

I reached through the thickening smoke for the shelf where I’d seen Helen stash the tape, but my numb fingers encountered two little plastic rectangles instead of just one.

Heat from the fire was toasting the left side of my face, smoke making it hard to see. I could hear heavy running footsteps, headed my way. No time to figure which tape was which, so I scooped them both up in my clumsy, tingling flesh-mittens and ran to the door.

 When I peered out the half-open door, I saw security men running towards me, guns drawn. So much for that way out.

Only one other option. I squeezed through the window frame and got gone, leaving plenty of skin behind on the jagged broken glass.

When I hit the ground outside, I took a second to orient myself and scope my surroundings. The now merrily burning building I’d just vacated was, in fact, a long, low stable. On the bluff above was a sprawling Spanish-style mansion than may or may not have been associated with the stables. To one side, a large freshly painted barn. To the other, a corral with two terrified, currently riderless chestnut horses eyeing the fire with flicking ears and swishing tails. On the other side of the stable, I could hear wild, panicking horses and shouting voices. Straight ahead of me, I saw a stand of small scrubby trees with a winding trail leading down through them. I couldn’t see the ocean, but I could hear it. It was a good a direction as any.

I half-ran, half-stumbled down the trail, clutching my precious cargo to my naked belly. The blood was finally coming back into my hands. It hurt like hell, but they were starting to feel like part of my body again.

Of course, I was still naked. And can I just tell you how much it sucks to jog without a bra? Especially with big tits like mine. So there’s that, and the fire behind me, and of course, the whole armed guys chasing me thing too. It’s fair to say pretty much everything sucked right then.

I could hear hoofbeats coming down the trail. There was no way I could out-run a horse, so I had to think fast. I ditched the trail and headed south, into the thick brush. Lacking a machete, or even a free hand to push thorny branches out of my way, I just bulled my way through, leaving even more skin behind. I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to keep this up for long, so I searched for some kind of opening to the west, something that would take to me down to the beach. After scrambling over huge rocks and through more dense, fire-hazard brush, I finally found a way down. Steep and dangerous, but doable. It would have been easier if I hadn't been holding the tapes and the gun, but I was all out of pockets.

The second I hit the sand, I made for the water and winged the incriminating gun into the surf. It disappeared with a small, hollow splash.

One problem handled, but another one gained. There were three people on horseback a little way down the beach. Helen on a paint mare and two of her rifle-wielding enforcers riding a pair of bays.

They spotted me the second I spotted them. Staring down those rifle barrels, I felt like the biggest, butchest bunny in the world. And rabbit season had just begun.

I ran.

I zig-zagged as I went, trying not to give my pursuers an easy shot. I wanted to believe they wouldn’t shoot at me on a public beach, but I still couldn’t take any chances. Unfortunately, the shortest distance between two points is not a zig-zag, and the horses were gaining on me way too fast. The land to my left had been mostly rough and undeveloped for the past minute or so, but now there was a small parking lot and beyond it the beginning of a neatly marked bike path. Cars in the lot. People leaning surf boards against the fence and changing out of sandy wetsuits. Witnesses.

I ran for the lot like my life depended on it. Which it did.

I made it, but Helen’s paint mare came pounding into the lot right behind me. There was a lanky kid with a goofy blond swoop of hair covering one eye, listlessly skating back and forth across the lot. He was so utterly flabbergasted by my tits that he didn’t even bother to try and swerve around me. I leapt aside at the last possible second, leaving the rubbernecking kid to faceplant into the sweaty flank of Helen’s horse.

The horse spooked and wheeled away, while the now riderless skateboard zipped over and bumped against my bare ankle.

“Thanks, dude!” I said, jumping on the board and flashing a thumb and pinkie “hang loose” hand sign at the semi-conscious skater sprawled out on the asphalt.

Now that I had wheels, I was finally getting somewhere. It figured that the Malibu Sheriff Department’s brand new two man beach bike patrol would pick that particular moment to make their rounds.

As soon as they saw my lack of proper bathing attire, they swung their bikes to block me, giving each other smirking, eye-rolling oh-this-crazy-town kind of looks.

Helen saw them and called out.

“Get that crazy woman,” she screamed. “She killed my driver and tried to shoot me! Stop her!”

They looked at each other again, smirks gone. I swore, swerving sharply to the left and banging a naked thigh against the rear tire of one of their bikes. I still managed to stay vertical, keep the board under my bare feet, and make it around their little impromptu barrier.

It’s a plush gig, beach patrol. Breaking up fights between surfers who’d had one two many brewskis. Rousting amorous couples or underage kids sneaking onto the beach at night. Maybe an occasional property crime or a busted car window. Not particularly challenging work. These two were a pair of twentysomething Ken dolls, fit, tan, and handsome. One Asian, the other white and blond. Underwear-model bodies and strong legs from riding their bikes all day, but I was willing to bet that under all that gym-steak, they were as soft-serve as Foster Freeze. These were guys who’d never discharged their weapons outside the firing range. I could probably take them both without dropping the tapes.

But I didn’t want to. Watching them fumble with their holster straps, eyes as wide and spooked as Helen’s horse, I felt for them. They were just a couple of kids who signed up because chicks dig the uniform. I didn’t want to fight, or worse, kill cops. I knew I was in the right here, but they didn’t. All they knew is that one of Malibu’s most prominent and recognizable citizens had just reported a murder, and the suspect was fleeing down their bike path. I couldn’t let them catch me.

Because I was willing to bet that someone like Senator Helen White had deep connections with the local law. See Malibu isn’t part of L.A, but it’s not incorporated as a city either. That area falls under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department instead of LAPD. Meaning I’ve got no juice of my own out there. If I got pinched in Malibu, she could have me tied up in legal limbo while she pulled strings and got that tape returned to her, unwatched. Without that tape, I had nothing. But Malibu’s southern neighbor was the affluent Pacific Palisades, and that was a part of Los Angelescounty. If I could just make it far enough south to fall under LAPD jurisdiction, the tape might stay out of Helen’s clutches.

Which meant, judging from where I figured I currently was, I needed to cover approximately ten miles of coastline. Naked, on a skateboard.

No problem.

29.

I was skating down the bike path as fast as I could, but the two Ken dolls had mounted up after me, and their bikes were faster. I’d been outclassed on foot, and now I was being outclassed on wheels. I risked a look over my shoulder and saw Helen dismounting near the exit of the parking lot, handing the paint mare’s reins to one of the other riders, and ducking into the back of a stretch limo. Presumably driven by someone other than Kelly.

That little thorn hurt, but there would be way more hurting if I let myself be distracted by thinking about Kelly. Like the hurting I’d experience if I ate asphalt in the buff, for example. Or ate a bullet if one of the skittish Ken dolls suddenly felt the need to man up and plug me. I had to stay frosty. Hang loose. I had a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time.

There was some kind of security barricade blocking the path ahead. Had Helen called ahead and had these guys set up to stop me? I didn’t think so. They didn’t look like Helen’s flavor. Complacent, not killers. Older guys in cheap uniforms, out of shape and shooting the shit, ignoring me and my wheeled entourage until we were almost on top of them.

I jumped off the board and ran for the beach. The Ken dolls had to ditch their bikes to follow me across the loose sand, hollering incoherent half-explanations to the private security guys as they jogged after me.

One thing you run into a lot in Los Angeles is film crews. It’s like our version of weather. Us locals see them as mild annoyances that slow traffic and make you want to throttle out-of-towners who get all flummoxed because they’ve never experienced such a thing before. Probably the same way you would feel about an Angeleno trying to drive through the snow in your town.

So it was hardly surprising to find a film crew set up on the beach ahead. A cluster of cheap, flapping tents. Handwritten signs, sharpie on neon green poster board, with wobbly arrows indicating parking and craft services for something called SO YOU WANT TO BE A GLADIATOR. From the title and the obviously microscopic budget, I figured it was a reality TV show.

The private guys had joined in on the chase, waving their hands and yelling into crackling radios.

I dove for the nearest tent and yanked first one, then two supporting poles out of the sand. I kept running, poles in hand and the whole tent came down, dragging along the sand behind me and exposing a gaggle of Z-list bimbos half-dressed in bad Roman goddess stripper outfits. They screeched and clutched scraps of glittery mesh to their exposed implants, heels sinking into the sand as they staggered helplessly around like frightened sheep, getting in the way of the chase just like I had hoped they would. The Asian Ken doll couldn’t resist stopping to help a girl who had collapsed sobbing on the sand, wearing nothing but a huge golden wig and a pair of snake-shaped bracelets. His buddy was a little more dedicated, or possibly less heterosexual, but was thwarted by an angry, headset-wearing P.A. who demanded to know the meaning of all this.

I used the diversion to duck under the hem of a second tent. This one was full of men. More swinging dicks and glistening, oiled-up beefsteak than Fubar on a Friday night. I felt like I’d walked into an X-rated UFC promo. I hid between two costume racks as the guys got their junk tucked into loin-cloths and geared up in their fake gladiator armor. I could almost feel my clit growing from breathing the thick miasma of Axe body spray and second-hand testosterone inside the tent.

I needed to wear something and there weren’t a lot of options so I grabbed a gladiator costume off the rack behind me. I hid both the tapes and my obvious lack-of-a-penis under a spare loin-cloth and was squashing my tits down under a bronze plastic breast-plate when a bitchy, silver-haired queen in a headset appeared in the doorway.

“Step lively, ladies,” he said, smacking Herculean glutes and herding the boys towards the exit. “We still have six more segments to shoot.”

I buckled a barely butt-cheek length studded leather-strip skirt around my hips, set a gaudy, face-covering helmet on my head, and joined the herd.

Outside the tent, I could see the angry P.A. had been joined by two others, plus an even more angry female second A.D., and they were stonewalling the Ken dolls while the private security guys stood there scratching their asses and looking put out by this irritating interruption of their meaningful discourse.

“Chop, chop,” our silver-haired wrangler said. “We’re going right into the foot race, and then they’ll shoot the blessing of the goddesses after lunch. I guess there’s been some kind of problem in the fish tent.” He performed a little exasperated, eye-rolling, what-are-you-gonna-do pantomime. “Anyway, onward soldiers!”

The guy marching next to me was a big strawberry-blond slab of bacon with a sweet, dumb smile.

“Isn’t this awesome?” he whispered, giving me a friendly elbow. “This is my first TV gig. I’m totally stoked. How about you?”

“Me, too,” I said, clearing my throat and pitching my voice low.

“I’m Kevin,” he said.

“Butch.”

He looked me up and down, and I was afraid he had made me as a chick.

“What are you, about 160?”

“150,” I replied, relieved but wishing he’d just shut up already.

“Hard gainer, eh?” He nodded, sympathetic. “Where do you work out?”

“Uh…” I looked up at the back of our wrangler’s silver head. “Gold’s Venice.”

“Dude!” he replied, happy as a Labrador with a Frisbee. “Me too! We should totally work out together. I can give you a few tips for bulking up. Help you put on an extra ten pounds of lean muscle mass, easy. And then maybe…”

I had no idea how to respond to this sweet but ham-fisted attempt at cruising. I couldn’t exactly tell him he was barking up the wrong gladiator skirt without blowing the whole charade.

“I mean…” He blushed and looked down at his gold-sandaled feet. “If you’re not into guys, I totally understand. We could just work out. It’s just… Well… I haven’t really met anybody around here yet.”

I really felt for the poor, dumb kid. Knowing that if he didn’t wise up fast, he’d probably end up shooting for Raging Stallion instead of Spike TV.

“I’m not into guys,” I said. “But maybe we can work out together some time. If you still want to after the end of all this.”

“Really?” The happy puppy face was back. “Cool!”

“Tell me your last name. We don’t have our phones on us now, obviously, but I’ll look you up, okay?”

“It’s Kaczanowski,” he said. “But I’m thinking of changing it.”

“I’m half Polish,” I said. “Mom’s side. I think Kaczanowski is an awesome name. That’s a name people will remember.”

“You think?” he asked. “But hey, listen, why don’t you just let me give you my number after the shoot?”

“I might be gone by then,” I replied.

“Zip it, bitches,” our wrangler snapped. “Miss DeMille is in the house.”

Miss DeMille turned out to be our bitter, jaded director, who had just arrived to inspect the ranks. He was short and balding with a dyspeptic expression and expensive glasses. He gave us the most perfunctory once over, utterly incapable of even pretending to give a shit.

“Listen, Henry,” he said to our wrangler. “We’ve got some kind of security problem.” He gestured with his chin at a chipper youngster who looked like Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen. “So I’m letting Josh handle the foot-race segment on his own. Don’t fuck it up.”

Miss DeMille headed over to the exponentially increasing chaos around the fallen tent with the air of a cynical teacher about to break up rowdy students for the hundredth time that day. I snuck a peek over my shoulder and saw that four more Malibu sheriffs had arrived along with the rest of the private security goons. This bubble was going to burst at any moment.

The wrangler and Jimmy Olsen got all the gladiators lined up and several cameramen lined up their shots, including one guy crouched on the back of an All Terrain Vehicle, driver poised and ready to speed along the beach ahead of the runners.

“TV gold,” the cameraman said to his driver with a smirk.

“Okay, guys.” This from Jimmy Olsen. “Let’s make this happen. Aaaaand…”

He looked over at the cameraman on the back of the ATV, like he was asking permission. Like the cameraman was really the one in charge. The cameraman nodded.

“ACTION!”

Jimmy Olsen had clearly been waiting his whole life to say that.

The ATV took off down the beach, with all of us right behind it. I’d somehow ended up in the middle of the line, closest to the camera. The last place I wanted to be, especially because one of the buckles on my breast-plate felt like it was thinking about giving up on me. I tried to hold it in place with my arms while running, but when I risked another look off to the side, I saw the cops and security guys we also running after us. After me, more specifically. That’s when the traitorous buckle snapped and the breast-plate slipped off, revealing the breasts beneath.

TV gold.

30.

“Cut,” the cameraman said, waving at his driver. “Jesus, cut. CUT!”

The driver slowed the ATV and the cameraman jumped off, amid groans and protests from my fellow gladiators, who had yet to realize what had gone wrong with the take. Kevin did, and was standing there to my left, quietly cracking up like a kid trying to keep it down in study hall and failing. Like this was the funniest gag he’d ever seen.

“What the fuck is going on here?” the cameraman asked.

Behind us, the director and several headset wearers had joined the running cops and security goons. I didn’t have time to explain my tits, I needed to get gone.

“Sorry, pal,” I said to the ATV driver.

“Sorry for what?” he asked. “Your tits?”

“No, this.”

I clotheslined the driver off the ATV and jumped on, revving the engine. The helmet tumbled back off my head as I accelerated, but I could still feel the sharp, uncomfortable edges of the two tapes under my loin-cloth.

“Kevin,” I called back over my shoulder, thumb and pinkie to held up to my ear. “I’ll call you!”

“Dude!” he said, still laughing. “I mean… whoa!” He gave me two thumbs up. “You rule!”

Now I had some serious wheels. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one. Several of the running security goons were hopping onto ATVs of their own and giving chase. So I’d upgraded from naked on a skateboard to topless on an ATV, but I still had a whole lot of trouble on my heels and miles to go before I hit the Pacific Palisades border.

I pushed the machine under me as fast as it would go, eating up miles and scattering sunbathers, tourists and surfers. I was drawing a crowd, all exhibiting a variety of amusing reactions to this big, topless butch gladiator speeding down the beach. You could tell the locals from the tourists based on their responses. The locals barely looked up from their iPhones, assuming that I was just part of the shoot. The tourists were all using their iPhones to film me.

I could see the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier glittering in the smoggy distance like a mirage. I didn’t have to make it that far, just far enough to get the hell out of Malibu.

I was almost there. But once again, almost wasn’t gonna cut it.

There was a pair of Beach Patrol SUVs with fat sand-tires parked nose to nose, blocking my path, along with more Malibu sheriffs and a handful of bored lifeguards who were clearly thrilled by all the excitement. On the other side of their barricade was political asylum. Baywatch land. Pacific Palisades. I had no choice but to swerve hard to my left, riding up over the edge of a foot path and surging into a crowded parking lot.

Bad move. Helen the cold shower had just arrived, her limo screeching into the lot at the same time as I did. Behind her was a pair of good old LAPD prowlers, lights blazing. I could have kissed their hoods, only she was between me and them, headed right for me.

The lot served a historic fish shack called Woody’s. Woody’s fish was awful. Everything was deep fried, and they probably hadn’t changed the oil since they opened in 1964, but people loved it anyway because it was a local institution and because they served peanuts in the shell and encouraged diners to throw the shells on the sawdust covered floor. There is no “Woody” unless you count the three vintage wood-sided station wagons on display in the parking lot. One of which I was about to broadside, along with the pair of sunburned and bandy-legged German tourists taking each other’s photos in front of it.

I swerved again, dinging the vintage Woody’s rear fender on my way past but avoiding the astonished Germans by half an arschaar. I plowed through the adjacent outdoor dining area, scattering plastic chairs and peanut shells and terrified customers as I went. I risked a look back over my shoulder and saw that the limo was right behind me, riding my gladiator-skirt-clad ass. I was running out of options so I blew through some orange cones and out onto a stubby pier that was closed for renovations.

The rotting pier held the weight of the ATV with no problem, but as soon as the limo hit those warped, salt-worn boards, the whole structure started to shimmy and groan. I was running out of pier way too fast. I dove off the ATV seconds before it went sailing off the end and into the Pacific.

I rolled to a stop just as the rear tires of the limo crunched through the rotten wood, dropping the long vehicle’s heavy ass several inches closer to the water. The driver who wasn’t Kelly was out of the front seat, gun in one hand and hauling the boss out of the back with the other. He was an older man with gunmetal hair and a hard face. Not to be fucked with.

My buddies from the LAPD were right behind the limo, guns drawn, but they were reluctant to step onto the creaking, dangerous pier.

“Get the tape,” Helen ordered. “Then shoot her.”

The driver turned, gaze and gun both locked on me.

“You heard the lady,” he said. “Hand over the tape.”

I looked at the new driver, then over his shoulder at the cops. So many guns, so little time. I had less than a second to come up with something resembling a plan.

I got slowly to my feet, reaching under my loin-cloth and pulling out one of the two little tapes, saying a quick, lapsed-Catholic prayer that it wasn’t Angie’s tape. With all those guns on me, I wasn’t gonna get a second chance to reach for anything without getting shot. I looked down at the tape in my hand. No label. Lucky again.

“You want your tape?” I held up the blank. “Here it is!”

I dropped the blank tape and kicked it to my left. It slid along the rotten boards and stopped with one corner hanging over the edge of the pier. Helen went bug-eyed and dove for the tape just like I knew she would, and the boards gave out under her weight, dumping both her and the tape into the water below.

She popped up between the gentle waves with a furious screech, flailing and spitting. Her driver looked at me and then at down at the boss, torn between his order to keep me under his gun or diving in to help Helen.

“I don’t think your boss can swim,” I said.

“Shit,” he said. “I just bought this suit.”

“Look at these guys,” I said, gesturing to the line of LA’s finest. “They can handle me without your help.” I put both my hands up and sank to my knees, calling out to my former coworkers. “I give up! Don’t shoot. I’m not armed!”

The driver sighed heavily, then took off his jacket, laid his gun carefully on top of it and dove in to the surf.

Meanwhile a featherweight female uniform came forward from the line, handcuffs in her raised left hand and pistol in the other. She was a looker, a young brunette nymph with big hazel eyes and full lips that would have been sexy if they were not drawn tight in a serious frown. She had clearly been chosen because she was the lightest and least likely to bust through the disintegrating pier. Good choice, if you ask me.

 “Down,” she said to me, carefully testing each step, searching for the strongest, least damaged boards along the way. “On your belly, hands clasped behind your head. Try anything funny and you’re dead.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said, easing myself down on my belly, hands clasped behind my head.

“Fucking shoot her!” Helen was screaming, in between spitting seawater and trying to climb on top of her long-suffering driver. “She’s dangerous. Shoot her!”

“Ma’am,” Officer Nymph called over the side of the pier. “Please try to remain calm. The situation is under control”

“SHOOT THAT BITCH!”

“Ma’am,” Officer Nymph said again. I love the way cops can make sir or ma’am sound like an insult. “I assure you that will not be necessary.” She knelt beside me and slapped a cuff on one of my wrists, pulling my arm down to the small of my back. “I told you, the situation is under control.”

I wanted to kiss her. I let her cuff my other hand instead.

She patted me down, but didn’t check my crotch. I could still feel the shape of Angie’s tape against my pubic bone. It was far from over, but I was alive and I still had that damning footage, so I’d call that a win.

Of course the media was there by then. Topless lesbian gladiator arrested on Woody’s pier! Looked like I was gonna be on TV after all.

31.

Remember how all this time I’ve been saying that I’d eventually come up with this brilliant plan that was gonna wrap everything up with a nice fat bow? I’d love to say that I did, but really the idea was Penny’s.

You’re not surprised, are you? Me neither.

I used my one call on Brink, of course, and she and Penny went to work to get me sprung.

The production company for So You Want To Be A Gladiator dropped all charges against me in exchange for my agreeing to sign a release allowing them to use the topless footage (nipples tastefully pixilated into a digital blur, of course) on their show. Which subsequently went on to become the top-rated “unscripted drama” that season.

Helen’s stable burned to the ground before the fire trucks could make it through the narrow, winding canyon roads. Helicopters with giant seawater scoops were able to kill the flames before the rest of the canyon went up and none of the horses were hurt, but one of Helen’s security guys got kicked in the chaos and suffered a broken jaw. Kelly’s remains were currently being exhumed from the ashes and would be hung up in the overburdened forensic lab’s job queue for six weeks at the absolute minimum, so Helen’s histrionic accusations of murder would have to wait until it could be proven that Kelly was already dead when the fire started. We’d both been warned not to leave the state while they got things sorted out. Me, I wouldn’t dream of it.

I did get stuck with an indecent-exposure misdemeanor I couldn’t shake, but  managed to skate with a $200 fine and a slap on the wrist. Meanwhile Brink pulled strings to get Angie’s tape pulled from evidence, and the three of us put Penny’s plan into action, with a little help from Mickey and her homies.

* * *

The next day, Senator Helen White had called a press conference to announce her decision not to run for reelection. Smart move, considering the shitstorm of bad press that would hit when Kelly’s murder went to trial. Even if Helen won and I got the needle, she knew that I’d spill everything I found out on the way down. And even if she believed I had no proof to back it up, the accusations alone would spark a media feeding frenzy. Some enterprising young muckraker would undoubtedly dig up something embarrassing and that would be all she wrote.

Helen was standing at the podium wearing her best Jackie O. suit and a solemn expression.

“As you all know,” she said. “My husband Harold recently suffered a near fatal heart attack.” She let her eyes mist over with a photogenic sheen of tears. “Now I may be a politician, but I’m also a woman. Flesh and blood and heart, just like you.”

She fumbled for a lace hankie, playing to the cameras as she dabbed at her crocodile tears, careful not to smear her mascara.

“I believe the good Lord has spared my husband’s life as a sign. A sign that He wants me to rededicate myself to my first and most important job. The most sacred job a woman can have. The job of a devoted and loving wife.”

She had this little video montage of her greatest hits all set up and ready to play. Images of her shaking hands with George W. and pretending to give a shit about ghetto kids over a soundtrack of some god-awful pop-country warbling. “Loving wife” was the cue she’d given the nerdy Asian kid she’d hired to hook a laptop up to a projector and play the footage on the big screen above her head while she waxed nostalgic about how much it meant to her to be part of this great country’s political process and how she would never stop fighting the ongoing battle to preserve American family values.

Unfortunately for Helen, that nerdy kid was currently in the trunk of Mickey’s Impala and Penny had taken his place, wearing his dandruffy Alliance Defense Fund ball cap and peering at the laptop screen through his smudgy glasses. Instead of Helen’s saccharine propaganda reel, the screen behind her showed the splash page of Benny Noble’s gossip site. Front and center was the video footage of Helen wearing a bonnet and sucking Angie’s tits.

Gasps and titters filled the crowd. I leapt to my feet, ready with my line.

“Senator,” I called. “Isn’t it true that you paid to have this prostitute killed in order to hide the fact that you paid her to make this sexually explicit video?”

Helen looked back at the video on the screen behind her and her face went the color of fresh cement. She turned back to me, silent and devoid of expression. All around me, reporters were on their cell phones, going ape-shit with the news.

“This video has received over 2 million hits in the past ten minutes,” I told her. “It’s over, Helen. All you can do now is confess your sins and hope you’re right about that forgiveness.”

I had no idea how she was going to react, but I sure wasn’t expecting her to shoot me.

She had a pair of rookie cops standing on either side of her podium, both Latino, both looking less-than-thrilled about this assignment. The one on the left was staring at the video with a blank, stunned expression. The shorter, heavier one on the right was fighting laughter and losing. Helen took a single, unsteady step towards the one with the giggles, looking like she might faint. When he took her elbow to steady her, she reached down and pulled his gun from his holster, aiming it right at me.

The chubby rookie was surprising swift and ballsy in his reaction to this astounding turn of events. He grabbed Helen just as she squeezed the trigger, spoiling her aim by precious inches and wrestling her to the ground a second later. She fired a second time and the kid took a round in the Kevlar on the way down, but he still managed to get the gun out of her hand and turn it on her while his taller friend put a knee in her back and cuffed her.

I just stood there dumbfounded for a handful of seconds, then staggered back, knocking over my cheap folding chair and crumpling to one knee with a leaking hole in my left shoulder. I felt like I’d been punched by God, adrenaline screaming through my veins as my body began to realize it had a lead visitor. Then the dull chill of shock started to kick in. I barely registered Penny throwing her arms around me and screaming for an ambulance. Then, nothing.

32.

I woke up in the hospital, Penny at my side. She was holding my good hand in both of hers, and it looked like she’d been crying.

“Butch?” she said when she saw that I was awake.

“Hello, beautiful.”

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Not bad for someone who just got shot,” I said.

“Glad to hear it,” said a second voice from the other side of the bed. “Your woman has been crazy worried over you.”

I turned to find Mickey standing by the window in her checked chef pants and a worn wife-beater, a faded bandana tied around her head. She had a brand new tattoo on the left side of her chest, a photo-realistic black and white portrait of Angie, haloed with healing scab. Above it, a banner with her name and birth and death dates. Below, the words Siempre en mi corazon.

There was no point trying to explain that Penny wasn’t really my woman.

“I can’t stick around,” Mickey said. “We got Chef Marcheline in the house with her TV crew tonight, so we all gotta be on our best behavior and act like she’s on the line every night.” She smirked, then turned serious. “I just came by to make sure you were okay. And, you know, to say thank you for what you done. For my Angie.”

“Can’t say it was a pleasure,” I said, letting go of Penny’s hand to touch the bandage on my shoulder. “But you’re very welcome.”

Mickey smiled that lean, barely-there smile and nodded. She gripped my good hand, then kissed Penny’s offered cheek.

“Take good care of this one,” Mickey said to Penny.

“Always do,” Penny replied.

Mickey turned to go. I watched her until she turned and disappeared down the hallway, thinking back to her request for a little quality time with Angie’s killer.

“Penny,” I said, a sudden chill in my belly. “What happened to Helen?”

“Currently hob-nobbing with the charming society ladies of the Century Regional Detention Facility,” she replied. “She confessed. Angie, Kelly, trying to kill you at the stable. Everything. But she claims to have been driven to depravity by pornography and childhood abuse and wants to use her own case as an example to start a grass-roots campaign against internet smut.”

“She won’t have time,” I said. “Jesus forgives, but Mickey doesn’t. Helen won’t last a week in CRDF.”

Penny nodded, solemn. Helen was a despicable human being, and if anyone deserved to be shanked in the shower it was her. But to be honest, I wasn’t really sure how to feel about that.

I tried to sit up a little straighter in the uncomfortable hospital bed and winced at the hot pulse of pain in my shot shoulder.

“Does it hurt real bad?” Penny asked, cute little worry lines between her dark brows.

“Nah,” I lied, looking down at my bandaged shoulder. “It’s just a cop-show hit.”

“A what?”

“A cop-show hit,” I said. “You know, how guys always get it in the left shoulder on cop shows, so they can keep on shooting.”

Penny laughed.

“Of course,” I said with a smirk. “On cop shows, the guy never passes out cold when he gets shot in the left shoulder.”

“You know what else happens on cop shows?” she asked. “After the guy gets shot and his faithful gal Friday saves his life?”

“What?” I asked, even though I knew what was coming.

“He wakes up in the hospital with her by his side,” she said. “And then they kiss and realize they were meant to be together and live happily ever after.”

“That’s the movies,” I replied. “On a series show, you can’t just have them live happily ever after because you need them to have more adventures.” I brought her hand to my lips. “Besides, the viewers like ongoing sexual tension more than happily ever after. Just look what happened to Moonlighting after Bruce Willis finally nailed Cybill Shepherd. Ratings went right in the toilet.”

“Fuck you, Butch,” she said, unable to stifle a smile.

I almost did kiss her then. I wanted to so bad it hurt, worst than the lead in my shoulder. But I didn’t.

“Maybe in season six,” I replied instead. “So do me a favor and get your spectacular ass out of here before I blow the whole story arc right here and now.”

That pretty smile of hers grew even wider, eyes sparkling behind her vintage librarian glasses.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Butch,” she said.

“You bet, baby,” I replied.

Watching her walk away, swinging that double barrel ass of hers like the deadly weapon she knows it is, I wanted to kick my own ass for letting her go. Even though I knew it was the right thing to do. But somehow, I couldn’t remember a single reason why.

So there I was, grumpy and horny and sore and staring out the hospital window at the uninspiring view of another hospital building, when a nurse arrived to check my wound.

“Ms. Fatale?” the nurse said. “I think you need a sponge bath.”

I looked back at the nurse and did a double take. It was Miss Diva Derringer, decked out in a minimalist white latex interpretation of a nurse’s uniform. White fishnet stockings and white platform heels with red crosses on the toes. Platinum hair pinned into a retro updo under a tiny, old-fashioned nurse’s cap. Eyes sparking and red lips curled into a naughty cat smile as she pulled the curtain around my bed.

“When I read about what happened,” she told me, leaning over me and pushing my hair back from my sweaty forehead. “I had to see you. I couldn’t let you check out until you get what I owe you.”

I suppose I could have argued with her that I was actually fine and explained the whole cop-show hit thing, but I was in no mood for talk. I just slid my hand around the back of her neck and kissed her.

My hands explored the slick latex contours of her curvy body as she sucked gently on my tongue, pulling it deep into her mouth and then backing off and playfully nibbling at my lower lip. Her raw sugar smell and the vanilla flavor of her lipstick were better than morphine. I forgot all about the hole in my shoulder. About Angie and Kelly and all the madness of the past few days. Everything.

After several minutes of that luxurious oblivion, Diva broke the kiss and crawled up onto the bed with me, pushing the control button to lower my head until my body was laid out flat. Then she knelt over me, straddling my face and carefully avoiding contact with my bandaged shoulder. She wasn’t wearing panties.

Her thick, tattooed thighs spilled over the elastic tops of her stockings and the tight skirt squeezed her ample ass cheeks together so that her pouty pussy lips were barely visible, almost completely hidden by all that luscious, overflowing girl-flesh. I was so glad to be alive in that moment, looking up at that stunning view and thinking back to a time when all I wanted was to live long enough to see something like this again. I was even more glad when she hiked up that tight rubber skirt and sat her meaty ass on my face.

 She was already wet and slightly sweaty, her own richly organic aroma intertwined with the sharp, science-fiction scent of latex. Gripping her ass cheeks with both hands, I made my tongue wide and flat and licked her pussy from top to bottom with slow vertical strokes. Then I slicked my right middle finger with spit and juice and slid just the first knuckle up into her asshole, teasing her while I flicked her clit with the tip my tongue. She responded by grinding her hips against me, nearly smothering me as the multi-O dynamo started gearing up for action.

All I could do was hold on and try to match her frantic rhythm. It was almost as if she was just using my face to jack off. She was a force of nature above me, a tiny tsunami and I could feel a storm brewing inside my own cunt. I waited until I felt all the familiar signs of her impending orgasm and then gave her the full length of my finger up the back way. That did it.

She might have been hollering and swearing at that point, but her shuddering thighs completely muffled my hearing. I didn’t care, as long as we didn’t get busted before I had a chance to get my nut.

To my surprise, she climbed off after just one pop.

“Your turn, Butch,” she said with a coquettish smile.

She wasn’t gonna get any argument out of me.

She knelt between my knees, pushed the blue and white hospital gown up over my hips and spread me open. I was more than ready.

As she lapped at my aching clit with her little kitten tongue, I found myself thinking about Penny again. About her jasmine tea and her dark lipstick and the way her thumb felt, sliding over the back of my hand. I was thinking about Penny when Diva slipped two of her fingers up into my cunt. I was thinking about Penny when I came, teeth clenched against her name.

You’re not surprised, are you? Me neither.