He laughed. “Bitch don’t need no chocolate, trust me.”
“Jerry,” Woody said. “I wouldn’t be talking shit about anyone’s waistline if I was you. You guys got kids?”
“The fuck that’s got to do with—”
“Marcie pushed your babies into the world, Jerry. She’s earned her stretch marks and saggy tits—if they’re sagging, that is. And don’t tell us about it if they are, on account we don’t care. But you’re banging a whore in a by-the-hour motel, so you don’t get to talk shit about her. You go to Walmart and get her some flowers and some candy and maybe one of those movies about a really busy family that adopts a dog and everyone falls in love again. Throw some dick her way, but wash it off first. Make a night of it.”
He rubbed one of his chins. “She likes those Madea movies—”
“Take one for the team, Jerry,” I said. “Just go. And know that we’ve got your license plate number, so we see you here again, we’ll tell Marcie.”
Jerry moved as fast as he could out the door. It still resembled a planetary orbit. Woody closed the door behind him and slid a chair in front of it to keep it closed.
I sat on the end of the bed. “What’s your name?”
She smiled at me like I was a sentient pile of dog shit. “Sparkles.”
“Uh-huh. What’d your mother name you?”
She knocked ash from her cigarette onto the carpet. “Ashley.”
“Great. Ashley, we need you to get your boss Tommy here.”
“What for? He owe you money or something?”
“Ashley, we have guns. The whys don’t matter when we have guns.”
“You don’t have to be such a fucking asshole about it.”
“Honey, you are not the first person to tell me this, nor are you going to be the last.”
“Today,” Woody said. He was about five feet behind me, gun at his side. “She’s not the first person to tell you this today.”
“We need to talk to him, that’s all,” I said. “I’m supposing he comes by and collects your earnings on a regular basis.”
She nodded. “Every couple of days.”
“You got a way to get in touch with him?”
“Yeah.”
“Then do that. Tell him a customer got rough with you, and that he needs to take care of it.”
Ashley finished her cigarette and crushed it out across the scarred veneer of the end table. She pulled a tissue-thin sheet across her skinny legs.
“And what about after you and him talk?” she said. “What do you think he’ll do with me? You figure he’s gonna be happy I lied to him?”
That far, I hadn’t thought about. If I was being honest here—and we’re friends, so I might as well be—I hadn’t thought most of this through and was just playing cards as they showed. Woody and I just hoped Tommy led back to Meadow’s murder.
The question I was having to ask myself, though, was how much of this girl was I willing to risk so I could test a half-baked idea with no grounding underneath it.
“We’ll take care of that,” Woody said. “Don’t worry. Just call him. Right, Henry?”
I nodded. “Right. We’ve got you.”
19
Ashley called Tommy. We only heard one side of the conversation, but the side we heard didn’t sound good. Tommy’s muffled voice resembled a combination of a dog’s bark and a bass drum. She sounded like even more of a child than she looked, and occasionally we caught her eyes flipping over in our direction as she talked, before she hung up and told us he’d be here in an hour.
Woody came up out of his chair and stretched. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Anyone else hungry?” He looked over at Ashley. “What about you? You want something to eat?”
“Whatever.” She worked hard to seem like she didn’t give a shit, but her eyes lit up a little at the mention of food.
Woody drove over to the Wendy’s down the road to get burgers while we waited. I stayed on the edge of the bed with my gun on my lap.
Ashley lit a fresh cigarette. “What are you assholes doing, anyway?”
“We have business with Tommy,” I said.
“You don’t look like the kind of guys who do business with Tommy.”
“What kind of guys do business with Tommy?”
“Tough guys. Mean guys. Your friend, he looks like a tough guy. You, not so much.”
“I’m tougher than I look.”
“I hope so, ’cause Tommy, he’ll fuck your shit up when he gets here.”
“Tommy a tough guy?”
Ashley climbed off the bed and put on panties that had been crumpled on the floor, followed by a pair of black tights that hung loose around her thin legs. She sat down in a chair near the window and stretched her legs out onto the table.
“He works out,” she said. “He does CrossFit.”
“I’m sure he’ll tell us all about it, then.”
Woody showed back up with the burgers. No one said much to anyone else. Woody ate the way he always did—methodically, patiently, as though whatever was going on around him was the most normal thing ever. Ashley wiped her burger out like it was an indigenous people.
I had a few bites of mine and threw the rest back into the bag. Ashley watched me and said, “You not going to eat?”
I shook my head and offered the bag to her. She ate what was left of my burger, plus the fries.
When we were finished, I looked at Ashley and said, “How old are you, anyway?”
“Why you asking?”
“Curiosity.”
“Wanting to make sure I’m of legal age and shit?”
“And shit. Definitely the ‘and shit’ part. That matters if you’re whoring around.”
“Fuck you, asshole. I don’t need shit from you.”
“And no shit will you get from me. If you’re fucking someone and they’re paying you for it, it’s being a whore,” I said. “We all whore ourselves for paychecks to pay the bills; you’re just doing it at its most basic, Old Testament form.”
She sucked on her cigarette. “I know what the fuck I do. Not like I ain’t figured out what they’re paying me for. What I don’t need is your sorry ass commenting on it.”
“You never answered the question.”
“And what question was that?”
I smiled. I tried to make it as warm and welcoming as I could. I went back to my state trooper training, learning how to deal with hostile individuals. Stay alert and away, but seem relaxed and calm.
“How old are you?” I said.
She turned her head away from me. “Fifteen.” She swallowed hard. “But I’m sixteen next month.”
I nodded. “How long you been at this?”
“A while. I was living downtown when Tommy came out of a coffee shop, saw me. Said I looked like hell. Asked if I needed help.”
“You were on the street?”
“Yeah. My mom, she kicked me out.”
“You from here?”
She shook her head. “Logan.”
Logan was maybe an hour away, or forty years—it was hard to tell the difference. Like much of southern West Virginia, it was a community built on the back of the coal industry, and it had been in denial about its ability to continue existing by pulling dead dinosaurs from the ground. Whatever had been there in a town like Logan during their peak, there was significantly less now, and staying there straddled the line between an act of defiance and acceptance of defeat, that somehow you could beat the big players at their own game, or you had nothing more to lose.
“Why’d they kick you out?” Woody said. He was standing behind me now. His voice stayed calm and level.
“My mom’s boyfriend got drunk one night while she was at work and it was me and him. Came into my room, his dick hanging out of his pants. Tried to get me to blow him. So I hit him, and he hit me back. Next morning, when she asks me why I’ve got a black eye, I tell her the truth, and that lousy fucker says I’m lying, so she told me to hit bricks. I couch-surfed for a while, but n
o one back there’s got anything extra to give someone that ain’t theirs already, so I thumbed my way to Charleston. Had to suck dicks to get here. I guess I should have blown Todd when he asked me to, and I could have stayed at home.”
I said, “So Tommy puts you up here, and you’re working to pay the rent?”
“Something like that. I’m not stupid, okay? But I ain’t got options, so I’m doing what I got to. I’m not like the other bitches around here, snorting whatever they find, or hitting the pipe. I’m clean.”
“How many other girls is Tommy working out of here?”
“In most of the other rooms. Some of ’em fuck, some of ’em do cam shows, some do both.”
Woody said, “Cam shows?”
“You know, where some loser watches ’em play with themselves on a webcam. I’m sure both of you guys know what I’m talking about.” She gestured at the rest of the motel. “Those rooms, they’ve got extra lights set up, looks like a movie set.”
“Sounds like Tommy’s got himself an interesting business model at work,” I said. “Why aren’t you doing the cam shows?”
“Too many rules, and I’m too young. They’ll bust your ass in a fucking heartbeat, they think you’re underage.”
“Whereas no one cares when they show up just to fuck.”
“Not really. Anyone asks, I always tell ’em I’m eighteen, though plenty of guys—regulars—they want me to say I’m younger. They’re fucking perverts.”
A shiver chased across her, and Ashley pulled the sheets further over her. She looked like a kid. The kid she was.
Headlights shone through the thin curtains, and the rumble of a tuned exhaust growled outside as a vehicle pulled to a stop and fell silent. Woody snapped his gun to his hand and stood at one side of the door. I raised my pistol and aimed it toward the entrance to the room.
The door flew open, flipping back, the doorknob embedding into the drywall. The guy standing there, his shoulders were so broad, they threatened to crack the doorframe. He ducked to get into the room. Veins like plumbing pulsed underneath arms that couldn’t be constrained by shirt sleeves. A spider web tattoo stretched across a bullet-shaped skull glistening with sweat. His eyes seemed ready to pop loose from his head.
“Ashley, what the fuck—” he said, then froze and saw me aiming a gun at him.
Ashley said, “I’m sorry, Tommy. I’m sorry.”
Woody took his pistol by the barrel and smacked Tommy in the back of his watermelon-sized head with the butt of the weapon. Tommy shuffled forward a few steps, then looked back at Woody, grabbed him, and threw him across the room. Woody whizzed by me like he had wings and slammed into the wall.
Then Tommy shifted those baseball-sized orbs he called eyes at me and charged.
“Oh fuck,” I said.
20
Tommy lay in the middle of the floor, motionless. His chest rose the slightest fraction of an inch and fell, and a gentle snoring noise emulated from deep inside him. The shattered remains of a wooden chair were scattered around his form. Ashley huddled in a corner, making sounds that would have been crying if they were just a little louder.
Woody pressed a wet washcloth to his face. Blood clotted in his beard, staining the gray a rusty metallic. I leaned against the wall, my legs wobbling, threatening to give out on me. My face throbbed, and a lump was forming underneath my right eye.
“You know,” Woody said, “you could have shot him and saved us a lot of trouble.”
“I was afraid shooting him would just make him angry,” I said.
Woody pulled the washcloth from his face. His nose was mashed into a shape it wasn’t meant to be in. He grabbed hold of the front and made a wrenching motion, and I heard cartilage snap into place. I pushed back the urge to puke. Instead, I slid down onto the floor and let my forehead rest against my knees.
“I’m thinking steroids; what about you?” Woody said.
“That’s always an option, I suppose, but they’ll make your dick shrink.”
I felt Woody glaring at me. That’s the kind of glare he has: one that radiates from the other side of a motel room, that you don’t have to see to understand. I lifted a finger in the air.
“However,” I said, “if you’re asking me if I think our boy Tommy there is juicing, the answer is yes. Steroids are the least of it. I’d say he’s doing three shelves of the local CVS, up to and including gummy vitamins.”
I tilted my head back against the wall. The movement made the heels of my feet hurt. Which was fine, since everywhere else pulsated with pain, and I liked to be fair and spread my misery around.
Woody helped pull me to my feet. I steadied myself with the wall, sliding upward at the pace of an arthritic snail with crutches. I was winded by the time I was upright.
Tommy was still asleep. Or unconscious. It was the difference between Saturday night and Sunday morning, I suppose.
“I’ve got rope in the car,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “You okay?”
“Should you have a transparent twin brother standing next to you?”
“I should not.”
“Then I may have a concussion. In fact, I’m almost sure of it.”
“They’re fun, aren’t they?”
I pushed away from the wall. “A blast. Come on. I want to tie this motherfucker up before he decides he wants another round.”
“You know we might lose that one, right?”
“If this is what ‘winning’ feels like, we are doing this shit wrong.”
Tommy woke up wrapped in sheets from the bed and bound by thirty feet of rope. He looked like the ugliest butterfly imaginable trying to bust loose from a cocoon. His eyes fluttered open, and once he realized he couldn’t get off the floor, he grunted and strained at the rope, rolled back and forth like a hot dog on a convenience store griller, and told us how happy he was to see us.
“You asshole-eating motherfuckers, I will rip your fucking heads off and shit down your throats,” he said. “I’m gonna pull your eyeballs out of your skulls and fuck your eye sockets. I’ll find your parents, and then I’ll fuck them, and I’ll burn their goddamn houses down, and piss on the flames, you faggot-ass motherfuckers. I—”
I slapped him across the face, back of the hand, Ike Turner-style. Ashley screamed and sobbed. She had moved corners but was still in a huddled position. Tommy strained to find her in the room. We hadn’t left him with much room for movement, and his neck was the size of a fire hydrant anyway, so he struggled to crane his head around. His beady eyes bored down on her.
“You cunt, after every goddamn thing I did for you, I—”
I slapped him again. He stopped talking. Thank God.
If I’m honest here—and why would I start lying to you folks this late in the game—I was hurting my hand more than I was hurting his face, but there’s something so satisfying about a back-of-the-hand slap, I think everyone should get to do it once or twice.
“Tommy, shut the fuck up,” I said.
“You motherfuckers are so dead,” he said. “You’re dead. You’re fucking goddamn dead.”
“And yet we’re not tied up in a bedbug-infested motel, are we?” I said. “So why don’t you stop cranking your cock holster and tell us how to get a hold of your boss.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Your boss. The guy who owns this rat trap and who’s running whores and porn and fuck knows what else out of here. You’re a bagman, and we’re looking for the main player here.”
“Fuck both of you faggots. I’m no goddamn bagman. I—”
“Asshole, you’ve got a spider web tattooed from one ear to another. You are not the brains of this operation. Skull tattoos aren’t a sign of business acumen. What you do is collect money and keep working girls in line and, I’d bet, slide the cops a few bucks and some pussy to keep ’em away. Whereas you have a boss, and he’ll know shit we want to know.”
Tommy twisted his head away. He could only move it a
few inches, though, so I took a step around to stay in his line of sight. I nudged at his skull with my foot.
“Thomas,” I said, “you might as well talk, on account we’ve got time and patience. If you don’t, we’ll just leave you here, and trust me when I say this, that you wouldn’t be the first person I’ve left tied up somewhere to die.”
Tommy sighed. “My cell phone’s in the truck. Mr. Black’s number is in it.”
“There any security code on the lock screen?”
“Yeah. It’s eight-zero-zero-eight-five-six-nine.”
“That’s a lot of numbers for a guy like you to remember.”
Woody cleared his throat. “It’s ‘Boobs 69.’”
“Of course it is. What else would it be?” I motioned to Woody and Ashley. “Let’s go.”
Tommy rolled onto his stomach and bounced around, trying to move. “Let me out of this goddamn thing, you goddamn faggots! I told you what you wanted!”
I pulled a pillowcase from the bed and crouched down in front of Tommy. “You did, and I’m thankful for that.” I shoved the pillowcase in his mouth before we walked out the door.
Tommy’s truck was a Ford with a decal of Calvin taking a piss on a Chevy logo pasted on the back window. His phone was on the passenger side floorboard, next to piles of protein bar wrappers.
Ashley said, “What are you guys going to do now?”
“Talk to Tommy’s boss,” I said.
“What about me? What the fuck about me?”
Woody leaned against the pickup, propping a foot on a tire and lighting a cigarette. “I’m betting you’ve got thoughts on your future. At least, I hope you would. Besides, Tommy’s none too happy with you right now.” Woody gestured toward the motel room door with his cigarette. There were hints of the giant asshole’s muffled screams.
Ashley bummed a cigarette from Woody. She seemed smaller and more fragile outside in the darkness. She exhaled a plume of smoke.
“You want to keep doing what you’re doing?” I said.
“You mean being a whore,” she said.
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