“Vigil,” I said. “Would you please take Georgie outside and try to come up with a good reason not to shoot him?”
“At last, a real challenge,” Burris said as he pulled Wilde to his feet, his other hand once again on his gun under his jacket, and walked him out from behind the table. Dragon stepped over and grabbed a clump of George’s chest hair. The old man gasped.
“No, please, allow me,” Dragon said. “I’ll keep him company out front.” George looked like he was face-to-face with a cobra, and, truth be told, he’d have been better off if he was.
“Hey, l-look, I don’t want no trouble, okay?” George said. Vigil smiled and nodded to Dragon, gesturing toward the entrance to the bank vault. The knight and Nightwise escorted George away, and it was just Elextra and me.
“I miss him already,” I said. “He really brightens a room.”
“They won’t hurt him, will they?” Elextra asked. “He can be a jerk, but he’s really sweet sometimes and he takes good care of me. He spent a ton on surgery to make me prettier.”
“Did you think you needed it?” I asked. She shrugged.
“It’s a tough business,” she said, “always someone with firmer tits or a nicer ass. Someone younger. Georgie, he’s just trying to help me keep up, y’know?”
“I think I do,” I said. I realized in that moment I could spend the rest of my days trying to save Elextra Dare and a legion of others just like her. I washed my hands of it and hoped that the old bastard said something to Dragon that got him eaten. “You were saying about Crystal?”
“Yeah, she was like a fairy, like Tinker Bell or something; she tried to explain it to me a few times when she was really drunk and high.”
“Didn’t that freak you out?” It was obvious that Elextra and George were not part of the Life, and her aplomb surprised me.
“Honey, I’ve had Guatemalan little people shit on me while I was dressed up like Lady Gaga, gettin’ fucked by the Easter Bunny. You think I’m gonna lose it over someone telling me they’re a fairy? Anyway, she said she couldn’t go home no more, she didn’t have a home no more. She had that ‘girl next door’ thing going on, and that got her lots of good gigs in the business. Nobody wants to watch a whore screw, but they will line up with their dicks in one hand and their cash in the other to see Little Mary Sunshine fuck. So she had plenty of jobs, but she started going down the slide, y’know?”
“How so?”
“You ride this train too long, sweetie, and it runs you over, one way or another, unless you got something real in your life, like I said. Some people in the business spend all their cash like they’re real fucking movie stars, others it’s booze or blow, or some other drug. Then there’s people like Crystal, who go further and further out into the gonzo shit, the kink, the real meatball bullshit. You work without a net in this business and sooner or later you just … disappear. I think that’s what might have happened to her. She was working more and more of that grotto stuff. Y’know grotto?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I do. She working for anyone in particular? Roland Blue?” Elextra nodded.
“Yeah, he pretty much owns the grotto scene in L.A.,” she said. “Georgie figured you and your crew for some of Blue’s guys. You got that whole Army of Darkness vibe goin’ and that weird way you sobered me up.”
“We don’t work for Blue,” I said. “I’m working a private investigation.”
“Ohh,” Elextra said with mock awe. “A shamus, a gumshoe … a private dick. Those are rare in my line of work.”
“Shamus?” I said. “Nice. So Crystal was getting into the real extreme end of the weird shit? Started taking bigger risks?” Elextra nodded. “For Roland Blue?”
“Yeah, mostly. I think Brett tried real hard to get her back into mainstream stuff, but she was pretty determined. It was like she was on a mission to destroy herself, to let herself be degraded, ’til there was nothing left of her.”
“Brett, who’s Brett?”
“Oh, Brett Glide, he’s a producer, director. Real sweet guy, even for this sewer of a town. He was one of Crystal’s regular employers when she got started out here in the business. Brett’s got a real good eye for finding talent that’s different. That’s how he made his money. Anyway, he and Crystal went out for a long time. I think he might have ended up being her one real thing, y’know, her anchor, if she had just let him. She up and left me holding the bag for rent and utilities when she moved in with Brett, didn’t even come back for her stuff. That was probably the last time I saw her, about two years ago, except at a few industry parties and stuff. We just hugged and said hi, said we’d hook up. We never did. She and Brett were pretty serious, but I heard she dumped him, maybe six months after she moved out, about a year and a half ago.”
“You don’t seem too pissed she left you holding the bag,” I said. Elextra smiled; it was pretty and genuine, and I wanted to take a crowbar to George Wilde for convincing her she needed to mutilate herself for him.
“Yeah, well, she was always sweet to me, kinda lost. I could see how she might not be from this world. I’m a sucker for love stories. I hoped she got a happy ending.”
I looked at Elextra Dare, a train wreck, a caricature of a porn queen, and I wanted so much to take her the fuck out of this fun house mirror of a city, get her back to where she had been before all this. Someplace safe and free, somewhere that George Wilde or any of a
