Money Shot

fifty pound pair of silicone beach balls shrink-wrapped to the front of her box-kite ribcage. Under her frazzled blonde weave, her face was a cheap doll’s face, flash frozen and nerve-dead from too much surgery. Her nails were crooked pink sloth-hooks and her bony, nervous hands made clutching, Nosferatu shadows across her concave belly. She had drenched herself in cloying, sugary perfume that smelled like the kind of cheap vanilla frosting that comes in a can.

I have never understood this new trend where girls who don’t eat anything but lettuce and ice cubes want to smell like cupcakes. On Taylor, the childish scent was made far worse by its inability to mask the toxic booze-breath and the underlying corruption of her slowly dying flesh. She made no attempt to cover her freakshow tits as she stood in the doorway glaring at us.

“Are you here to get that girl?” she asked.

Malloy and I exchanged puzzled looks.

“We’re looking for Vic,” Malloy said.

“He went to find someone to help get that fucking psycho bitch out of my bathroom,” Taylor said. She gestured down a dim, cluttered hallway to her right. “If he doesn’t get back soon, I’m gonna call the cops and let them know they can take him too for all I care. You see if I don’t.”

“Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with?” a hoarse voice shouted. “Do you? You don’t know who I am!”

It was Roxette.

Suddenly, Taylor was crying. Her frozen face struggled to crumple into something like a human expression but all she could really do was open and close her bloated lips, like a dying fish.

“I told him not to bring girls here anymore,” Taylor said, leaning heavily into the doorframe. “What he does on his own time is his business, but this is my house. It’s my house.”

“That’s terrible,” Malloy said, taking her by the shoulder and gently moving her out of the doorway so we could enter. “You let him live under your roof, the least he could do is treat you with some respect.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Taylor said, looking up at Malloy. “I’m not the jealous type. I don’t want to run his life, I just want respect in my own house. Is that so much to ask?”

“Of course not,” Malloy said, motioning for me to shut the door. When it was closed, he caught my eye over the top of her head, gestured toward the bathroom door with his chin.

I left Malloy with Taylor and headed down the hallway toward the bathroom where I had heard Roxette’s voice.

“Roxette,” I said, knocking tentatively on the door.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Roxette replied. “I’m not stupid.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Roxette,” I said. “Why don’t you open the door and we can talk about it?”

“You think I don’t know about the transmitter?” she whispered. “I know all about the transmitter.”

I shook my head. This was going to be really bad. I took a deep breath and took a gamble.

“Roxette,” I said again. “Roxette, it’s Angel.”

“Angel?” Roxette’s voice sounded suddenly anxious and childlike.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“How do I know it’s really you?” Roxette asked, voice suddenly closer as if she had just pressed up against the other side of the door. “What shoes was I wearing on the day we met?”

I rolled my eyes. That was nearly a year ago. I couldn’t even remember what shoes I had been wearing that day. I tried to focus on recalling Roxette’s feet. It had been the middle of a hot San Fernando summer and I seemed to remember her painted toenails so the shoes must have been open toed. Sandals of some kind, but that was the best I could do. I was drawing a blank.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

A jagged sob sounded behind the door.

“I can’t remember either,” Roxette said, bawling like her heart had just been broken. I heard a rhythmic thumping and was pretty sure she was hitting her head against the door.

“Please, Roxette,” I said. “Just open the door a little ways. I won’t try to come in if you don’t want me to, okay?”

The thumping stopped.

“Okay,” she said suddenly, like it had never been any big deal.

I heard the lock disengage and then a sweaty slice of Roxette’s face appeared in a narrow crack, a single pinhole-pupiled eye staring out at me like the eye of a trapped animal.

“Oh my god,” Roxette said. “They cut your hair!”

A hot, skinny hand reached out and pulled me into the bathroom.

Taylor’s bathroom looked like it had been designed for a life-sized Barbie. Pink on pink with pink trim, pink carpet, even a pink toilet. The added splashes of irregular crimson clashed violently with the girly bubblegum color scheme.

Roxette was naked and icy pale. It was nothing most of America hadn’t seen before, but there was a new addition. She had a hole in the top of her right thigh. In her hand she clutched a pink toothbrush, its bristles clogged with blood. There were bandages all over the floor and I could see a flat, pancaked bullet in the bottom of the pink toilet. It wasn’t a stretch to figure she had dug that bullet out of her leg with the toothbrush. I was horrified when she turned away from me and went back to work on the hole with the bloody bristles.

“I’m pretty sure I got most of the transmitter out,” she told me, not looking up from her task. “But they make them so they can rebuild themselves if even one tiny piece is left so you just can’t be too careful.”

“Who did this to you?” I asked. “Who shot you, Roxette?”

“It was those guys my dad sent to spy on me,” she told me. “They have cameras in their eyes that transmit back to his office by satellite. You think that’s just in the movies, but you’re wrong. My dad owns the company that invented the technology for eye cameras. If you don’t believe me, just watch the Discovery Channel. See, as soon as my dad found out I had the briefcase, he told them to shoot me with a transmitter bullet so they could track me. They thought I didn’t know about the transmitter but ha ha because I showed them, didn’t I? I got away and showed them.”

“You sure did,” I said, trying not to look at what she was doing to her leg. “What happened to the briefcase, Roxette?”

She gestured at a sopping pile of towels in the bathtub. “I covered it with wet towels to block the signal. Now I need to get to Vancouver before 3AM tonight or else.”

She looked up, suddenly confused.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“It’s me, Angel,” I said.

“How do I know it’s really you?” she asked.

I was losing ground.

“They poisoned my cat,” she told me. “I found his head in my purse.”

She went back to her scrubbing.

I figured Vukasin must have been the one who shot her. Either him or one of Ridgeway’s other errand boys. Whoever stole the security tape from my building had probably just methodically gone down the list of every single recognizable person who had visited my office that day. Roxette is pretty recognizable. She would have been easy to find. I couldn’t imagine how she’d managed to get away from whoever shot her without losing the briefcase, but whatever had happened it had clearly sent her over the edge. Instead of going to the cops, she’d gone to Thick Vic Ventura.

I struggled to come up with some way to get her to give me the briefcase, some clever ruse that would dovetail into her ever-shifting psychosis, but I just couldn’t think of a thing. In the end, I didn’t have to. She made me take it.

“Oh my God!” she said suddenly, whirling around and gripping my arm way harder than you’d think a skinny little thing like her could. “God fucking god, I need you to do me this really huge favor.”

“Okay,” I said warily, trying to extract myself from her grip and failing.

“You need to take the transmitters to the Channel 7 news.”

“Sure,” I said, trying to keep a neutral expression as she pressed her hot face closer to mine. Her eyes were both vacant and terrifying.