Only one other door led off the hall and we took it, moving fast through the narrow opening and spreading out on the other side.
The next room was bigger, and empty. At least some attempt had been made at decoration here, with a couple of faded prints on the walls—illustrations out of the
A built-in couch had been fitted into the corner. It was covered in pink velour and had retained its original nasty hue by dint of the clear plastic cover that protected it—from what, I shuddered to imagine. The illumination had been kept low in a poor attempt to be seductive. A single bulb filtered through an upside-down dark red shade. The dull lino underfoot made faint sucking noises as we crossed it.
The far wall was covered by a thin curtain, that was suddenly pulled aside. Sean and I both reacted instantly, snapping the guns up. An Asian girl with long straight blond hair came through, wearing a smutty pale pink negligee. She froze for a second when she saw us, then started screaming.
I was closest. I reached her in one long stride and, following Sean’s earlier example, hit her with my upswept elbow under the jaw, aiming for the sweet spot just to the side of her chin. The effect of the blow was magnified by the fact she had her mouth open when I delivered it.
Her teeth clacked shut as her eyes rolled back and she dropped, graceless enough that I didn’t have to check if she was faking. She and the blond wig parted company, revealing short black hair, badly cut, beneath it. Close to, she was neither as young as she was supposed to be, nor as old as she had become.
I turned to find Sean watching me.
“What?” I said. “You think the ‘Harry sent me’ line would have worked on her?”
“Maybe not,” he agreed, “but let’s try and leave the next one awake enough to answer questions, shall we? Like—where’s your father?”
I turned away without answering. As soon as we’d entered the place I’d been fighting the underlying sense of panic. My father might be many things, but indiscriminate was not one of them, and the last thing you could possibly be in a place like this was choosy. Surely, if he’d really wanted the services of a prostitute, he would have picked somewhere more upmarket than this. On sanitary grounds, if nothing else.
Shaking my head did little to dislodge the recreant idea of it. I flexed my fingers round the pistol grip of the illegal gun. If anything
My only disquiet was that it wouldn’t be the first time.
“Let’s find out, shall we?”
The brothel was laid out on five narrow floors that branched out from a musty central stairwell. Each floor had rows of doorways along a thin partition wall, leading to tiny, lightless cubicles. Sean and I swept the building from the ground up.
The occupants were nearly all female and mostly alone. The majority of the workforce looked Asian—possibly Korean or Vietnamese. The girls seemed to live in the rooms where they worked, their few shabby possessions hidden behind a curtain or in a flimsy plywood wardrobe.
The place had a smell all of its own. Old cooking fat that had been overheated one time too many, mingled with stale sweat and other, more earthy odors, all not quite masked by the false cheer of cheap fabric freshener and the thin reek of even cheaper perfume.
And desperation. The only locks we encountered were on the outside, which probably accounted for the browbeaten lack of reaction to our arrival. If any of the girls spoke English, they weren’t making a big thing of it, but I suppose it was unlikely they were being paid—in any sense—for their sparkling conversational skills.
On the fourth floor up, we kicked the lock off the inside of a door this time and found a woman older than the others, a fact which was obvious even in the low light. Her larger living quarters spoke of middle management rather than labor.
We caught her bending over an old square sink in one corner of the room, and she straightened with an expletive that was pure homegrown Brooklyn. Statuesquely built, her most startling feature was a pair of massive breasts that, to my cynical eyes at least, were so clearly man-made they probably had a “Best Before” date stamped on them. Her dress was gaudy without even the excuse of being cheap.
Very recently, someone had caught her a belter across the left-hand side of her face and she’d been trying to negate the aftereffects with a cold wet cloth pressed against it. She went deathly pale at the sight of us, but stood her ground, putting the cloth down slowly.
“Who the fuck are you?” she demanded. Her eyes flicked to the doorway behind us a couple of times, waiting for Goliath’s intervention. When it didn’t come, she checked us out again and frowned. Her tone modified a little. “Whaddya want?”
“English guy,” I said shortly. “Came in here about half an hour ago. Where is he?”
She heard my accent and her face grew calculating, but she didn’t try to bluff us. By the look of the bruising, she’d tried that ploy once today already and it hadn’t gone well for her.
“Upstairs,” she said. The reluctant fear in her voice twisted in my belly, grabbed at my chest as I began to move. “Hey, I didn’t have nothing—”
“Stow it,” Sean said.
He was right behind me as I took the stairs to the final floor two at a time, was alongside me as we broke our way into each of the matted little rooms up there. He didn’t speak, and I’m not sure I would have heard him over the raucous clamor inside my head even if he had.
It was the last room. It always is. We hit the door hard enough for the flimsy hardboard to rip out of the frame and sway drunkenly from one hinge before toppling to the floor.
Inside, we found my father standing centered under the dusty bulb. He was minus his suit jacket, with the buttons of his shirt halfway open, revealing a vee of pale hairless chest beneath, and he was just in the process of sliding his tie out from under his collar.
Or rather, the girl in front of him was taking care of that part.
She was young—much younger than just about any of the girls we’d seen so far in that place. Well under the age of any kind of informed consent, with taut skin the color of latte and glossy long dark hair. Her back had been to the doorway, presenting us with a perfect view of a slender body not yet entirely spoiled. She spun, gasping at the violence of our arrival, to reveal classic almond-shaped eyes.
Apart from too much makeup, she was completely naked. Just for a moment, the side of my brain responsible for lucid thought and reasoned argument totally shut down. Instinct and training took me forwards, only peripherally aware of Sean moving to check and secure the room.
I closed in on my father, registered the absolute shock and the pure, undiluted shame that coated him like a layer of grime, moments before he covered it with a haughty mask. That was what did it. Another silent lie on top of all the others.
Blinded, I gave a howl of utter rage and backhanded him across the face with enough force to snap his head round. I was still wearing my bike gloves, which had tough carbon fiber protectors across the backs like lightweight knuckle dusters. My father staggered a pace from the blow, but made no attempt to block me or prevent another. That was enough to bring me up cold.
Raked with guilt and anger, I felt the blood drop out of my face so fast that my vision buckled and I nearly fell.
“You …
The certainty that he was dead, and all the emotions connected to that conviction, had set vicious barbed hooks deep into every part of me. The sudden discovery that he was very much alive ripped them out all at once, leaving behind a bloody mess of tattered thoughts and raw confusion.
He was alive, and I wanted to kill him for it.
“Charlie.” It was Sean who spoke, gently, firmly, putting his hand onto my forearm to press it downwards. It was only then I realized I had the gun up, had been watching my father’s reaction over the top of the sights and had seen nothing wrong with the picture that presented.
“Don’t do this,” he murmured. “I hate to resort to cliche, but he genuinely isn’t worth it.”
I let my arm drop away, found it was trembling as badly as the rest of me.
