Finally he threw off the sheet and lay on his back, sweating, his fists clenched at his sides, feeling his heart race, feeling like a man in prison who’s just realized he has a case on his cellmate.
I don’t know how long I can take this.
I have nowhere else to go.
He should worry about Buugh catching up with him. He should worry about getting punished for having gone AWOL, for taking funds out of the RO, for letting his team get out of control, for letting his team win a basketball tournament—fuck, those RO guys were small-time. Something like that upset them? Then he remembered Buugh’s eyebrows wriggling balefully, and the sight of his file sliding toward the wastebasket, teetering on the edge.
Ish turned over with a groan and felt his dick touch the sheet and quiver like a schooner mast in a high wind. He rolled onto his back again and covered his face with the pillow.
POG
Next day I staged a rebellion of one. “I’m not cooking breakfast for this mob.”
Everybody grumbled. I told them hardheartedly to eat some cereal if they were starving, and why hadn’t they eaten enough last night? They grumbled and whined but they wandered back to their rooms and got dressed. I could hear Beth in the bathroom, negotiating with Cricket, who had awakened looking sixty again.
The bathroom. Yeah. Reg would have to explain to Ish about aiming. This crowd would not tolerate the toilet seats being left up, let alone sprinkles on the seat or floor. And now we’d have to limit everyone to twenty minutes. I groaned.
I found Ish messing with my laptop at the playroom end of the kitchen. “What are you doing with that?” I said.
“Verifying your monthly stats and payrolls.”
“We log our own stats,” I said. “In fact we do it weekly, or oftener if we get really busy. That’s why we get paid so much. Because we do our paperwork.”
“Yeah, but then I have to verify your reports. Layers and layers of paperwork,” he grumbled.
“Don’t. It’s a really bad idea.” When he didn’t take the hint, I slapped the laptop lid shut.
“Hey!” He looked up at me.
“Does it occur to you,” I said, “that you can be traced to this machine? If you’re on the run, it would be smart not to log in from here and tell the Regional Office where you are.”
He started to bluster. “I’m not on the run—”
“Bull.” I glared, and he dropped his gaze. “C’mon. You’re putting yourself in danger.”
“I know that,” he said in a tone that admitted he wasn’t sure he wanted me to know it. “But I’m not gonna gyp you guys out of this month’s pay just because I’ve—I’m, uh—”
“That’s very sweet,” I said, unplugging the laptop and taking it away from him. “But maybe Buugh will figure out you’re staying with us, and then he’ll decide we’re sheltering, like, you know, a fugitive, and then what?”
Ish blanched.
The dumbass was filing his reports because that’s what he did on a Wednesday. A born paper-pusher.
Across the hall in the bathroom, Jee and Reg were having a fight. Jee’s yells mixed with thumps on the wall.
I patted Ish on the head. “It’s the thought that counts. Are you coming to Ann Sather like that?”
“What?” he said, looking down at his arms. “You don’t like my paisley polyester?”
“Hey, if you don’t mind being taken for our senior pimp, we don’t.”
He bristled. “What do you mean, senior?”
“I mean Cricket has been a demon two months, and apparently she wants people to think she’s our grandma. You’ve got this fifty-year-old Vegas pimp thing going on—”
“Chicago,” he blurted. He blushed.
“What?” I sent him a delighted grin. “You’re from Chicago? What part?”
Ish looked uncomfortable “South Shore.”
“You’re kidding.” I looked him over. “Where’d you go to high school?”
“St. Philip Neri,” he mumbled.
My eyes narrowed. The fight across the hall got quieter. I could hear Reg speaking in between Jee’s angry yowls. I said, “Wait, did you know I was from South Shore when you recruited me?”
Immediately Ish looked evasive. “Did I recruit you?”
“Don’t play coy. You know you sent Delilah after me.”
“Did not!” He got a panicky look. “And don’t say that name!”
I rolled my eyes.
Outside in the hall, Amanda yelled impersonally, “People are in line for the bathroom!” That reminded me that I needed my twenty minutes in there.
I sent Ish a look. Pretty soon we would have to have that talk. The lid was off a lot of things, up here in the field.
An hour later we were sitting in Ann Sather Restaurant’s biggest booth. As often happened, Beth’s occasional coffee date, Doyle the homicide cop, had showed up and muscled into the booth next to Beth. They murmured and bickered quietly, side by side. More lovey-dovey.
Ish was acting paranoid. He elbowed me and, when a waiter went through the swinging door in the back of the dining room, he pointed. “Look! There’s a demon in the kitchen!”
“You’re dreaming, Ish. That’s a chef.”
“No, I’m not. He’s a commando demon. He’s from that—” Ish whispered, and then clammed up. He seemed twitchy.
I looked where he was looking. The kitchen door swung open again as a busboy came out. I didn’t see anyone scary. Big, funny-looking guy in a chef’s hat, maybe. He had his back to us, working over his grill.
“He’s a demon,” Ish hissed. I sneaked a look at Doyle, wondering if he heard that. Doyle seemed to be flirting intensely with Beth.
“Chef,” I hissed back.
“They’re onto me,” Ish insisted. “I saw his horns.”
I peered again. The guy in kitchen whites seemed completely preoccupied with his spatula. “I don’t see them,” I said. “Anyway now is not the time to discuss.”
“Yeah, shut up and drink your coffee,” Jee whispered.
That night we trolled the Art Institute, since it was Members Night and they had a reception with wine and hors d’oeuvres, and there were lots of places to go off into a corner with some guy in expensive tweed and make him jizz. Beth, Amanda, Cricket and I were busy for two solid hours.
Beth went for the guys with second wives and rent-a-dates. Cricket fixed guys’ marriages with her mojo. Amanda just fucked them—this was just a job for her, one more thing an athlete could do with her body for money.
I went after the men who came with a first wife, the haughty kind who needed to look down on me.
Funny thing. After eight years as a fat whore, I didn’t care about attracting men. Men were easy.
I wanted women’s envy.
I still hated those bitches who had pushed fat me right off the sidewalk, and stepped in front of fat me at the check-out line, and ignored fat me while I waited for my turn in the doctor’s office, and turned fat me down for decent jobs over and over and over. I wanted them to burn with envy and rage when they saw thin me—especially when they saw me eating. Or walking out of the room with their man on my arm.
There was plenty of satisfaction to go around here tonight.
Jee and Reg hadn’t come. I felt sorry for Jee not being with us. Guilt gnawed at me for leaving her at home. But two nights last week, she woke up screaming. Reg finked her out. And, knowing that, I simply couldn’t countenance letting her come out with us, and maybe setting off whatever horrible memories were waking her up. Sucked, but there it was. At least Reg was on the job, to keep her from going completely around the twist.
“What are you thinking?” Ish said at my elbow after I returned from servicing a socially-ambitious lawyer in the elevator at the Rice Pavilion.
“I was just feeling grateful that Reg is around to handle Jee when she’s in bad shape.”
“Jee? This is the little brown gal with the razors in her eyes?” Ish said skeptically.
“Don’t judge.
She was forced into child sex slavery for seven years before she joined us. She’s still only fifteen.”
“Shit.” Ish paled. “You’re shitting me.” He muttered something under his breath. “Fifteen? Are you sure?”
“Like you didn’t know?”
He sent me an evasive glance. “Shit,” he muttered again.
We strolled around a corner into a more brightly lit section of the Early American gallery. Cocktail tables were set out here, and little fake candles glowed on them. By their light Ish looked unhappy.
I dropped my teasing tone. “What’s the matter, bro?” I pushed him down on one of the dinky rented chairs.
He sent me a look of exasperation and despair. “I don’t want them to come after you, too,” he blurted.
“Them who?” Light dawned. “The Regional Office?” I burst out laughing. “They’re scared stiff of the field.”
“They have commandos,” he whispered.
“Really?” My voice dripped scorn. “You wouldn’t be referring to those big hairy schlongs from Anger we just whupped on the basketball court?”
“Don’t mock. They have tricks. They know how to deal with the field.”
I patted his arm. “Take it easy. Why should they come after us?”
“Because you’re shielding me.”
“Well, ‘shielding’ is a big word,” I began, and caught his look of panic. “You goof, I’m not gonna hand you over to those monkeys from Anger, even if they do come calling. You really think you’re that important to the Regional Office?”
“I don’t know,” he said wretchedly. “I’ve never really known where I stand, you know? I just dove into the deepest hole I could find and pulled it after me.”
“Why? What brought you into the Regional Office?” Normally I wouldn’t pry. But this was Ish. He felt like my baby brother. And frankly it was smart to keep my demonic supervisor on a baby-brother footing. Because who knew when he would return to his desk in Lust and try to boss me for real? “What happened?”
He wouldn’t meet my gaze. “I did something bad.”
“So? A lot of people do bad things, and they’re still walking around in the field.”
His fists opened and closed on the little table, and he stared at a butt-ugly painting of America’s founding father. “I got somebody killed. Somebody nice.” He put his hand up, as if the nice didn’t matter. “I was ready to—I felt horrible. I felt like I belonged in hell.” His voice deepened. “And I got lucky. Turns out, in the Regional Office, you don’t have to feel anything.”
Said the guy who had been drunk and horny twenty-four/seven since he moved in with us.
So, what, did that mean he’d sent himself to hell? Who did that anymore?
As he sat there looking remorseful, I realized that he seemed familiar. Then I got it. That senior pimp style was actually a strip club owner style.
Suddenly I was back in sixth grade, and my then-best-friend was introducing me to his dad, Morty Greenberg, owner of Muffy’s, AKA Strip-O-Rama, AKA Elvis’s Mini Pearl, AKA Shake Shack, AKA Gold Nugget Gentlemen’s Club, a girly bar on Chicago’s south side.
Ish was a dead ringer for old Morty.
“I guess Lust Division was a good choice,” I said to humor him. Wait, could Ish be Morty? Morty was South Shore born and bred. He would have gone to St. Philip Neri in his day. Morty’s lifestyle had been rough enough that anything could have sent him to hell, from paying off cops and the mob to making strippers out of young girls. Skinny young girls. That touched a raw memory.
A little more maliciously I said, “Do you know, I’ve never meet anyone else from Lust here? I thought I ran into an Anger op a few weeks ago at a bar up Ravenswood. He said he’s mowing lawns now.”
Ish’s face was a rubber Halloween mask of alarm. “Mowing lawns?”
“Can you believe it?”
Ish reeled in his rickety cocktail party chair. Man, this guy had spent way too many years in that deep hole of his. I led him over to the cash bar and bought him a couple of beers and made him sit down and drink them.
By the time he was done, he was almost varnished, which made me shake my head in contempt—we demons are notorious for our capacity—and the girls had turned up, each with her own fistful of cold beers. Beth pulled a teeny notebook and pencil out of her clutch purse and solemnly jotted down the stats on her scores, a habit from her soccer-momming days. Amanda drank her beer and people-watched. Cricket was talking animatedly to some silver fox over by a naked marble guy.
“Ish, are you okay?” Beth said. “Do you want one of my beers?” She shoved it across the tiny cocktail table. “He doesn’t look very happy. Should we fix him up with someone here?” Her eye roved over the artsy donors doing the wine and grapes thing. To me they all looked ninety, except for the occasional rent-a-date, who looked like us, only less perfect.
Ish’s eyeballs swelled as he sucked the beer down. I couldn’t look at him now without seeing my ex-best friend’s dad.
Weirder and weirder.
“Uh, I think he’s gonna sit this one out,” I said. I couldn’t see any of these rich old broads falling for Morty-Greenberg-style mojo. “Are we done here?”
“I’m good,” Amanda said.
“I’ve covered my quota and I’m four into my bonus,” Beth said proudly. She was still new enough to be tickled to death by the money she earned slutting. Me, I just banked my pay. A girl could only spend so much on self-adornment and fine dining. Unless she was Jee, of course.
I said, “We ought to get back to the Lair and see how Jee’s making out.” I felt even guiltier about Jee, and even gladder that we had Reg to cope.
Beth drove the van, because she was willing to sober up enough. Cricket and Amanda were murmuring, their heads together. It made me miss Jee even more.
I sat on the bench seat in back and stared across at Ish. He was watching me with his perpetual anxious expression. In the dim light from traffic that filtered through the van’s tinted windows, he didn’t look so much like Morty anymore. He had a young Barry Manilow thing going, especially with those horrible sideburns. In fact, he looked a lot more like—
Suddenly I sat up, nearly blinded by recognition.
In that moment, I knew.
It wasn’t his face I recognized but that look. That gee, Polly, can I carry your books? look, hope combined with resignation and joy and despair and shame and boyish aggression.
I knew now what he had been hiding since he showed up. And I knew why he acted so scared of me half the time, and the other half, he acted like my kid brother, brash and relaxed and familiar.
He looked like Morty’s son. My ex-best friend and constant companion from age eight up to fifteen. The guy who had turned me away in my hour of greatest need and finished the job of ruining my life. Ishmael Greenberg. Mal. Ish.
ISH
Back at the Lair, the crazy dark one, Jee, was apparently asleep. Reg, her keeper-slash-cabana-boy-slash-onsite manager, was drinking beer in the kitchen. All the other ladies were in their rooms getting into something loose.
Ish grabbed a couple more sixes of that insanely good beer from the nearest fridge. He figured he was ahead of the game so far. Pog couldn’t have a clue who he was, or she’d have given him the boot.
Reg said huskily, “Hey, buddy. Divvy.”
Ish handed over a six. “Let’s sneak out. It’s gonna be raining estrogen in here any minute.”
He led Reg into his room, which had been Reg’s room not long ago, and shut the door very quietly. Today had been just one shitstorm after another. He wondered if he would ever find another hole deep enough to hide in.
“So what’s shaking?” Reg said, when they were parked on the floor against separate walls.
“You tell me,” Ish said, eyeing this pathetic excuse for an onsite manager. “You’re the guy doing dishes and kissing butt around here.”
Reg nodded. He didn’t seem particularly concerned.
“How the hell did that happen? How co
me you’re with what’sername with the killer eyes?”
“I’m with her because she made me her slave on my third day.” Reg grinned. “Okay, the first day, she threw me offa that balcony out there. Second day, she got me sent to jail. But the third day—” He wiggled his eyebrows.
Shit. Off a balcony, no less. Ish was horrified but he wasn’t surprised. “I sent you here to be onsite manager,” he said, puffing up half-heartedly.
“Yeah.” Reg nodded. “Thanks.”
His calm annoyed Ish. He was totally pussywhipped in the Lair of the succubi. The goddess of love had fucked them all over somehow, the Regional Office might fall on them like a ton of bricks any minute, and this guy was happy. Oh, and he was clearly head-in-a-bucket in love with the biggest bitch on the team.
“I set you up,” Ish snapped.
Reg looked blankly at him. Ish realized he was waiting for footnotes. There was something deeply inappropriate about Reg. He seemed at peace.
Ish waved it away. “Ah, what do I expect? I picked you for clueless. You were the worst candidate for the job,” he clarified. “No way would they put up with your mouth and your pimp fantasy. But I had to give ’em a manager. The Regional Office doesn’t let women be bosses, any more than the Home Office. So I sent them you. I knew they’d figure out some way to, uh, deal with you.”
Still no reaction. Holy shit, I chose well. Ish just hoped the kid could swing a baseball bat or something if he had to. Those demon commandos were scary motherfuckers.
“Best thing ever happened to me,” Reg said finally, and paused to swallow beer with a blissful expression. “I owe it all to you. You saved my life. Thanks.”
Ish felt warmth spread over him. He assumed it was humiliation, his number one most common emotion, but after a minute he decided it might be something else.
Nobody ever thanked him.
Reg wasn’t nearly as ugly as he remembered. Probably fixed himself up. Ish remembered Pog teasing him for looking like his dad on purpose. Over the inevitable blush that followed that thought, he admitted, “Ah, what the hell. I hired somebody just like me.”
Reg split a grin. “I’m just like you? Cool.”
Coed Demon Sluts: Omnibus: Coed Demon Sluts: books 1-5 Page 86