Surely an actual wife and mother didn’t have to settle for that.
Her stomach full of lead, Beth stared into her margarita glass. “I think I see.”
Pog poured more margarita into it. “That glass is full.”
Beth nodded, watching frost melt on the outside of the glass and trickle down onto the table. “I think.” She bent and took a sip, feeling the sour mix zing across her palate and a spike of cold shoot up into her right eye. She put her hand over her eye. “I think I want to know what’s up with this arrest thing.”
“Meaning?” Pog said.
“I’d like to know how Blake is handling it. Only he’s in jail. Does he think I’m dead? Why do they think he did it? Things like that.” She caught Pog doing an eyeroll. “I want to know,” Beth said doggedly.
“He’ll be out soon enough,” Jee said. “Guys like him have lawyers on tap.”
Beth knew this to be true.
“Shall we make another field trip down to Oak Park?” Pog said.
A hot lump formed in Beth’s throat. “You guys.” She swallowed. She felt maudlin drunk and ashamed of herself. “I’ve been such a bitch.”
“You have,” Jee said, “but I’m a bitch too, and a better one than you. You’ll improve.”
“You’re very confused,” Pog said.
“Amen,” Beth said.
Back at the Lair, pleasantly full of food and pleasantly buzzed, Beth began to feel better about everything. She squeezed past the contractor, who was talking in a low voice with Amanda, and tried to ignore the sizzle as her tennis dress brushed against his slacks. The bathroom was still a demolition zone. She pulled a plastic veil like a giant shower cap off the sink and brushed her teeth, peed out some of her margaritas, and washed off as much of her slut makeup as she could without a mirror.
She considered Jee’s remark about making lemonade out of all these life lemons.
She had a lot to be pleased about. The Latino gentleman who ran the roach coach had not confined his admiration to Jee. The waiter at Cheaters had smiled at her every time he came by to refill their glasses from their pitchers, which he didn’t have to do. He hadn’t smiled at Jee—which surprised Beth, until she watched her roommates more closely. The coed demon sluts didn’t give any man attention unless they wanted something from him. They had an air of glossy invulnerability. exactly as if they were the dolls or robots they resembled.
Jee actually scared men. At first Beth thought it was her air of being an alien with infinite poise. Then she thought it was Jee’s rage, which seemed never far from boiling over. Whatever the reason, men would rather smile at Beth than at Jee. For that matter, they seemed to give Beth more attention than they did Pog. That fact was intensely gratifying.
Pog didn’t seem angry. She was much nicer than Jee—although Beth was wary of trusting in Pog’s kindness.
Thinking she might do Pog’s dishes for her, Beth walked into the kitchen and found Reg modeling his new wardrobe for Jee.
“Nice choice of tee shirts,” Jee said, nodding. “That’s what, a Lauren?”
It looked like a plain shirt to Beth. Reg did look good in it, she noted. In a chaste white tee and blue jeans, he almost had some dignity.
“Ninety dollars on sale,” he said, holding his arms out and strutting in a circle, so that the ladies could get his full awesomeness in the tee shirt.
“It’ll last for you, too, if you don’t get blood on it,” Jee said. “The jeans are a little too high in the rise.”
“I like to show off my waist,” Reg said defensively.
“I’m not looking at your waist, Reg. And so far, I’m paying for it,” Jee reminded him without much menace.
“Why is she being so nice to him?” Beth whispered to Pog.
“He cleaned the oven,” Pog whispered back.
Voices sounded in the hallway outside the kitchen. “So you’ll stay until the second shift comes in,” Amanda’s voice said.
“Of course,” said a man’s voice, syrupy with accommodation.
“Thanks, Carl. Now we’re going to need some privacy for a while, us ladies. Just knock on the wall like this—” a knock sounded on the wall “—when you want me.”
“Okay,” Carl’s voice said eagerly.
Amanda stuck her head into the kitchen. “We ’bout ready?”
Beth looked at her roommates. Now what?
The contractor appeared in the doorway, his boyish face flushed, his polo shirt unbuttoned.
“Give us five minutes,” Jee said.
“Sure.” Amanda looked back at Carl the contractor and raised one eyebrow.
Carl’s face transformed with incredulous delight.
Pog rolled her eyes.
Beth realized with horror that not only had Amanda just been screwing this man, but they were about to go and do it again. For five minutes. There would barely be time for thank you, ma’am!
The kitchen door shut on Amanda and Carl.
“Okay, Reg, this is your new assignment,” Jee said briskly, handing him back his shopping bag. “Beth here has just been messed over and dumped by her ex-husband. Said ex-husband, one Blake Saunders, was arrested last night. Your mission is to find out where they’re holding him and when he makes bail. Find out how to contact him. Get him a message that Beth wants to see him at Barclay’s in Oak Park tonight around seven o’clock. Then you find out where he will be at five-thirty and get back to us. Got all that?”
Reg repeated it back quite accurately. Jee and Pog exchanged approving glances.
“You can go now,” Jee said.
“One more thing,” Pog said. “I’m thinking Beth may be a little too short. Go stand next to Beth for a minute, Reg.”
Beth’s eyes widened in alarm. “Even if I was too short,” she began, “what on earth do you expect me to do—” She broke off.
Reg moved to stand directly behind her.
Tingles ran up her back. She spun around.
“Okay, Reg, make like you’re dancing with her,” Pog said. “Foxtrot, or a waltz, you dork, not that stupid stuff,” she added as Reg started to do the robot. “Hold her hand—oh, hell, look.” She walked over and arranged Beth and Reg in a waltz pose. “Now hold it while I check something.”
Embracing Reg, Beth felt thoroughly rattled. Reg’s hand burned in hers. Up close, she realized he wasn’t a bad-looking young hound. If only he could keep his mouth shut.
“Nice tits,” he murmured on cue. He pulled Beth close until they were pelvis to pelvis. To her horror, Beth felt a thrill of desire rush from their point of contact through her whole body.
Pog inspected their dance pose, oblivious. “Lift this arm. Stand on tiptoe, Beth. Nah, she’s not too short.”
Beth hyperventilated through her nose so nobody would notice.
An eternity later, Pog said in her ear, “Okay, break time. Reg, we need that information, and a date for Beth with Blake Saunders.”
“Change your shirt,” Jee recommended.
Beth couldn’t move. Lust paralyzed her.
Pog separated her hand from Reg’s and pushed Reg out of the room. “Sheesh, Beth,” she said when she had shut the door behind him. “Get a grip.” She was looking at the top of Beth’s tennis dress.
“Yeah,” Jee said. “Although I like ’em on her.”
“Like what?” Amanda said, swaggering in and pulling up the waistband of her sweat pants at the same time.
Beth allowed herself to be shoved down into one of the big easy chairs lined up in front of the wall of TV screens.
“Reg rubbed up on her and told her he liked her tits, and she grew some,” Pog said. “Size does matter.”
“Size—what?” Beth looked down at herself. She was still dressed to be Pog’s twin in Pog’s white tennis dress, gold bracelet, blonde bob, and flat sandals. The morning in Blake’s secret apartment seemed a lifetime ago.
Now her boobs were huge and straining against the dress. Beth gave a gasp. Her inbreath made her nipples pop up out of her
flat-chested bra and rub against the fine polo mesh of the tennis dress. She nearly swooned with pleasure. “What happened to me?”
Amanda smiled.
Jee said to Pog, “You’re the one who made her touch him. What did you expect?”
“I expected her to feel something. I didn’t expect her to redesign her body to please the little putz,” Pog said.
“I did that?” Beth reached up and tentatively cupped the sides of her new Betty-Boop breasts.
“Remember how you restyled your hair?” Pog said.
Beth met Pog’s eyes. “That was a magic hairbrush. Wasn’t it?”
Pog shook her head. “That was you. You wanted different hair, you got it. Reg liked your tits, you were lusting after him, so you gave him more of what he liked.”
In one balletic leap, Beth jumped out of the La-Z-Boy. She crossed her arms over her chest. “I did not! I mean,” she said, realizing in panic that her arms wouldn’t quite cross across her chest, “I didn’t know I was doing it.”
“This is why we’re not nice to men,” Amanda explained.
“They only want one thing,” Jee said.
“We’re built the same way,” Amanda said. “Succubi bodies are engineered by male demons, of course, to match male sexual response. If we touch, we want to fuck. If we want to get anything else accomplished, we have to focus. Men are a huge time-wasting distraction.”
Beth stared at her. She expected insight from Pog, or even Jee, but not Amanda.
“Yeah, we underestimate her all the time,” Pog said as if reading her mind.
If Amanda noticed this remark, she didn’t show it. “So it helps to know what you want.”
Suddenly the lecture in Cheaters made sense to Beth. “Ohhhhh.”
Jee looked at Pog and turned her palms up.
Pog shrugged. “Report time.”
“Why don’t we do this once a month, the way the incubi do?” Jee grumbled.
“Because we’re smarter than they are,” Pog said.
Beth’s roommates each raided their own personal refrigerators and the junk food stashes for cold beer, Twizzlers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, corn chips, Cheetos, and deep-fried pork rinds. Then they assembled in the row of La-Z-Boys.
Pog had a computer in her lap. “Okay, who scored?”
“Didn’t we do a prelim report two days ago?” Jee said.
“Yes, and Amanda was the only person who didn’t fake her report,” Pog said.
Beth listened, fascinated.
Apparently, once a month, each sex demon was required to log into the Regional Office’s Remote Field Reporting System and, apparently, tell elaborate lies about whom she’d been sleeping with and what she did with them. This gave Beth insight into the workings of an institution so big, it more resembled the late-stage USSR than the unstoppable strike force of evil she’d been reared to imagine.
The Regional Office valued quantity over quality. They didn’t care if a sex demon serviced a mortal soul with a blow job, a hand job, a tongue in the ear, a finger up the anus, or full-on sexual intercourse. It was the thought that counted. By those lights, even such a slacker as Pog could fill her full monthly quota with three sex acts or three acts of temptation, each act with a different person. Put that way, and taking into account how easy it was for these ladies to get someone interested in even moderately naughty behavior, Beth realized how soft her new job could be.
“I wouldn’t be upset if my daughter did some of these things,” Beth protested, as Jee recited a litany of men bumped into in the grocery checkout, men smiled at, men French-kissed in the elevator.
“She’s picky,” Pog and Amanda chorused.
“I’m picky,” Jee said.
“I thought you wanted to make the entire male gender suffer,” Beth said.
“That’s my personal mission. The Regional Office will pay me for, like, whatever.” Jee’s hand fluttered. “Your turn, Pog.”
Pog turned in a similarly lackluster report. It still took twenty minutes to fill out every little blank on the form. Whenever she made a mistake, she had to go back and start over from the beginning. She swore a lot.
Beth began to think much better about her prospects of earning thirty pieces of silver per month.
“Wait,” she said to Pog, “you had sex with the electrician? But I was here the whole time he was. We came home, I washed my face, and then we all watched Reg’s fashion show.” She said nothing about her crotch-bump with Reg. It still deeply embarrassed her that she could find someone as repulsive as Reg arousing.
Deadpan, Pog said, “You take a really long time to wash your face.”
Beth stopped commenting after that.
Amanda’s report included sex with a guy from the moving company who had moved their stuff in before Beth had arrived; the busboy at Barclay’s; Carl the bathroom general contractor; and two of the Readymen sent by the contractor for demolition of the existing bathroom.
“Ew,” Jee said. “Those guys are ex-convicts and Messicans.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “And? They were great. I’m sixty percent over quota. You’re getting by on a hand job and the shit you’ve done to Reg, who you lied about and said was two different guys. And what have you got against Mexicans? You were born in a cardboard box on a third-world beach.”
“Fuck you,” Jee said without heat.
“Ladies,” Pog said, and such was the magnetism of her personality that the other two settled down immediately. “Beth? Do you want to report anything?”
Beth had not missed the part where each of her roommates pulled off her shoe or sandal and inspected the sole of her foot. She leaned over and looked at Amanda’s left foot. Tattooed faintly in blue on her bare sole was a number...a very long number.
“Um, I don’t have the tattoo.” She remembered Jee telling Reg to get his IIDN tattooed on his inner thigh.
“She doesn’t have a number,” Pog said as Amanda twisted herself in her La-Z-Boy to inspect Beth’s left foot.
“How do you know?” Jee said.
“I just know,” Pog said, raising her voice.
“I don’t,” Beth admitted. “Is that going to delay my paycheck? Because I owe you all a lot of money already.”
“You don’t owe me anything.” Jee waved that away.
“Focus, Beth,” Pog said. Beth was beginning to realize that Pog was the real team leader, whatever Reg thought. “Did you arouse lustful thoughts in anyone in the past three days?”
Beth gave that question some thought. “Well, there was Blake.”
“Excellent,” Pog said. “We know all his stats. Plus, we can re-enter him as B. Shanley, first initial only, and double your score for that evening at Barclay’s. Plus, you left feelthy pictures of yourself in his secret apartment. Hey, I think all three of us get credit for that, don’t we?” Pog added, looking at Jee. “That’s another score for us.”
“Hell yes. Then there’s Reg,” Jee put in. “You gave him a boner when you pretended to dance with him.”
Beth flushed. “He, uh, gave me something, too,” she mumbled.
“Well, halleluia,” Jee said.
“Don’t be ashamed of that,” Amanda advised.
“Ka-ching,” Pog said, typing rapidly.
“But how can I get credit for it if I don’t have a tattoo?” Beth insisted.
“That’s a good question,” Amanda said.
“Ish will handle it, right?” Jee said.
“In a manner of speaking,” Pog said.
“What manner of speaking?” Amanda said. “She’s either in the database or she isn’t.”
Swiftly Pog backed out of the database on the big screen on the wall and powered down her laptop. “Okay, break time. Beth, you take the first shower. The rest of you, couple of data points.” When Beth just stared at her she said, “Go on. Hop to it.”
Not reluctantly, for she had had a very long day, Beth clambered out of the La-Z-Boy and slumped off to her room.
As she closed the do
or she heard Amanda say, “That girl had better get her ashes hauled soon, or next thing she knows, she’ll be screwing her ex.”
Pog
“That girl,” Amanda said laconically, “had better get her ashes hauled soon, or next thing she knows, she’ll be screwing her ex.”
“Shut up,” Jee said. “Pog’s got a secret.”
“All right,” I said as Jee and Amanda turned curious faces to me. “Remember I said we’d get recruits from a variety of sources? No? You ought to pay more attention. I said it when Beth first showed up,” I added in a boy, you people are slow tone of voice. I had to bluff my way through this or we would have more trouble.
“No,” Jee said. “I don’t remember.”
“Yes,” Amanda said. “But I don’t see how you can get recruits from anywhere except the Regional Office. Beth ought to be in the system. She should have a number already, whether it’s tattooed on her foot or not.”
“Should is a big word,” I said, stalling for time.
“Wait,” Jee said. “Are you telling me we have someone from off the grid on our team?” Off the grid meaning not part of the Judeo-Christian heaven-hell dualist infrastructure.
I drew a deep breath. “Technically, yes.”
“How is technically yes different from absolutely yes? Ish knows about Beth, right?” Jee persisted.
These girls would make amazingly good operatives if I ever needed that. Right now, all I needed was a team of coed demon sluts. Good luck confining them to task.
I took another deep breath. “Okay, listen up. This is not something I can say more than once.”
They shut up, for a miracle.
I put one finger in the air. “Want to know why this division isn’t your typical backbiting, double-dealing snake pit of mindfuckery such as you find in every other circle of hell? It’s because Ish is no good at that stuff.”
Second finger. “Want to know why our jobs don’t matter? Because mortals have given up on the whole chastity thing. The field is fast approaching the level of license one saw in the late four hundreds BC. Votes for women, minimum wage, gay marriage, cats and dogs living together—mass hysteria.”
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