“The man. Mr. Pryce. Pryce with a “y,” not an “i”—that’s the name he said to call him.”
“Pryce is the one after you?”
“Yes!” she snapped impatiently. “Just let me . . .” She stopped herself, pulled a deep centering breath through her nose. Her hand on my knee went limp. Then she spoke slowly, being clear with herself more than with me. “This Pryce said he knew about the plan. To bring Lothar into court. He said we couldn’t do it. We could either call it off, or he could stop us, whatever we wanted. ‘It’s your choice,’ is what he said. But there isn’t a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Vyra piped up.
“Save it for something you know,” I told her. “This isn’t about shoes.”
I felt the jolt pass from her all the way through Crystal Beth to me, but she stayed quiet.
“Vyra’s in this too,” Crystal Beth said, her tone both defending and defensive. “If we go ahead with the plan, he’s going to hurt her too.”
“How’d he say he was going to do that?”
“With . . . information,” Crystal Beth said. “That’s what he has, information. Secret information. When I first heard his voice, it was on the phone. On a special line I keep. Unlisted, in someone else’s name. It doesn’t connect to me in any way. We use it for . . . business. He knew my voice. Said he had listened to it on tape enough times to recognize me easily.”
“So he got a phone number. Pulled a wiretap. That don’t make him James Bond.”
“He has it
“He’s just trying to spook you. What would he get out of—”
“It’s not just me,” Crystal Beth whispered urgently. “He could put Lorraine in prison. And he could hurt Vyra too.”
“How?”
“With my husband,” Vyra said, her voice dead.
“I thought he didn’t care about . . .” I said. Vyra had told me plenty of times that her husband thought it was fun that she slept around. All he wanted to do was listen to the details, take topless photos of her, lick her shoes and pay the bills.
“He’d care about this,” Vyra said in the same tone.
I waited, but she wasn’t coming off anything more.
“Okay, this Pryce guy could take it all down. Fine. What does he care?”
“Care?”
“About this Lothar geek. Why does he want to protect him so bad?”
“We don’t know,” Crystal Beth said, flat-voiced. “That’s the job. The one Vyra said you could do.”
I was in a room with two women. Within the last few days, one had held my hand in the street, sat on my lap and told me secrets. The other had paraded around in her new shoes and sucked my cock. Now they were together, and they wanted me to do something.
It wasn’t easy, telling them that I had to get paid for what they wanted.
So I stalled.
“I don’t know if I could do it or not,” I told them. “I’m not even sure something can be done. There’s no schematic for a thing like this.”
“Will you at least talk to him?” Vyra asked.
“This guy, he’s an information-freak, right? Got stuff on both of you, on other people. That’s his weapon. Me, I’d be going in there without one. And maybe, he gets a look at me, I go on his list.”
“You scared of him?” It was Vyra talking, but I’d heard that kind of thing from women all my life. And from girls before them. I have the scars to prove it—ones you don’t need a Ph.D. to see.
“Damn right,” I said. “Add it up. You got some Nazi loon who wants his kid to help seed the Master Race. And you got somebody else running interference for him. Somebody who knows a lot he shouldn’t know. And you want me to ‘talk’ to him. How about spelling that one out?”
“You know what we want,” Vyra said.
“No you don’t,” Crystal Beth corrected her, standing up and bending toward me. “Remember what you did for Harriet? Well, maybe something like that. But not . . .”
There it was. “I got paid for Harriet,” I reminded her. “And there wasn’t any major risk in it. At least, not like this.”
“I have money,” Vyra said.
Crystal Beth rolled herself a cigarette. When she got it burning, she held it out to Vyra . . . who took one short drag and handed it back. Now they were waiting.
“How do I find this Pryce?” I asked. Thinking, if he’s as good as they were saying, he probably already knew about me.
“I have to call this number,” Crystal Beth said. “Tonight. Before midnight. Then he’ll call back. I’ll tell him then. And I’ll call you.”
She left Vyra where she was, took me down the stairs to the back door. Stood on her toes, her lips next to my ear. “I’ll tell you everything soon,” she promised, holding on to the front of my belt with two fingers, keeping me close so I’d listen.
I stepped into the biting-cold night, eyes on the clear sky. And walked away slowly, the weight of treachery yoking my shoulders.
It was almost nine when Clarence’s Rover swooped down, plucking me off the corner. I climbed into the front. The Prof’s hand dropped onto my shoulder.
“You was a long time in there, Schoolboy. You get enough of a look to pull Herk off the hook?”
“It was never about Herk,” I told him. “He was never the game. The poor bastard just stumbled in.”
“Figures,” the little man said acidly. “So we’re out?”
“I’m not,” I told him.
And then I told him the rest.
“You can never shed a street-brand, honey,” Michelle said. Sitting in my booth at Mama’s—next to the Prof, facing me and Clarence. She was perfectly coiffed, wearing a red satin jumpsuit with a wide black belt, her lovely face slathered in full war-paint, getting ready to work. I’d asked her once why she dressed up just to work the phones. “It’s all feeling, baby. If you
Michelle does tele-sex. She’s the best at it. If you could run fiber-optic cable under a glacier, her honey-silk voice would melt it. And she’s the finest natural hustler I’ve ever known.
Michelle is my sister. No biology there, something closer to the root. We had the same father and the same bond: the State and our hate. She’d been born a toy. By the time she knew the medical term for what she was—a transsexual—her freakish family had found a dozen ways to use her. So she ran. Headlong, like a man jumping off the top of a blazing oil rig into the black ocean water below, knowing whatever was down there couldn’t be worse.
She’d known she was a woman trapped in a man’s body even before puberty tortured her from both sides of that twisted line. In the bent-sex underground where Michelle survived, the sadistic trick nature played on her raised the price of the tricks she turned. She climbed into the front seat of cars and dropped to the floor, each time wondering if the driver would be that life-taking psychopath all hookers know is out there somewhere.
Michelle stole whatever she could, and lived the same way. She kept trying do-it-yourself to make things right. Almost destroyed her body with back-alley implants and black-market hormones. Always saying she was
