“Let’s get it all out of you.” Goren worked his hands down her spine, avoiding the bite mark on her shoulder. “We’ll begin on the table, and then I’ll bathe you. We’ll wash it away together, the pain, the tension. Then I’ll hold you in the bed for a while, and if you decide you’d like to advance into an intimate experience, we can do that.”
“How long have you got?”
“I can do three hours,” he said.
Jessica sighed again, her whole body releasing, exhaustion shuddering through her. “That sounds great.”
He guided her up, drew her to him, kissed her on the mouth, hard and long, the way he knew she liked. She could feel his cock, erect already, through his jeans.
“Let’s reverse the order, though,” she said.
He smiled and lifted her off her feet.
BLAIR
Ada Maverick’s strip club, The Viper Pit, opened at 5 p.m., in time to catch the after-work crowd. Sneak and I waited on Olympic Boulevard, squinting through the low afternoon sun at the big iron doors, trying to find refuge from the heat in a bus shelter that reeked of urine. There were four men waiting outside the doors for opening time, glancing at their watches or phones, rolling their shoulders, and wiping sweat from their brows. After a while, as we watched, a preacher in a black shirt and trousers arrived and started counseling each of the men in turn, appealing with his hands out. Before long a huge white man in a suit came out of the iron doors and seized the preacher by his collar, lifted him off the ground, and dropped him a few yards down the street, shoved him so hard to get him going that his head snapped back as though on a spring.
“This is your big idea, huh?” Sneak asked. “I can see why you didn’t want to do it.”
“I’m still iffy about whether we should or not.” I shifted uncomfortably, watching the club. “It might be a bad idea.”
“You’ve got to risk it to get the biscuit, I suppose.”
“Hmm.”
“Tell me about this alert thing before we go in,” Sneak said, trying to light a cigarette in the warm breeze.
“As soon as I asked the counter cop about Dayly, I was whisked away into a back room by some detective, Al Tasik.” I told Sneak about Tasik’s behavior. The roughhousing and the questions about how I was connected to the case. “There must have been a flag on the file. He was called up when I said Dayly’s name. Tasik didn’t sound like a guy who wanted help. He was … kind of angry.”
“Did you get the feeling he’s looking for Dayly, too?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe the scene at the apartment was an arrest gone wrong.” Sneak gave a worried sigh. The thin, hesitant sigh of a mother pushed to the edge. “They came for her. She fought them and escaped. Bailed out of town. Maybe she kicked this guy Tasik in the nuts on the way out and now he’s got a hard-on for her.”
“You said she wasn’t that kind of kid. The running-from-the-law kind, I mean.”
“We’ll soon find out. But this. This is a terrible idea,” Sneak said, gesturing to the club with her cigarette. “Mav’s a raging psychopath. Like, she’s got a diagnosis for it and everything.”
“Are you allowed to have a name like Ada Maverick and not be a raging psychopath?” I wondered.
“I heard Ada isn’t her first name.” Sneak exhaled cigarette smoke into the wind. She looked hard-faced and cold despite the sunshine. “She changed it because her mom gave birth to her in a courtroom and called her Custa’d.”
“The courtroom? Like, in front of the judge?”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like jailhouse bullshit to me,” I said.
“I heard that when a girl I knew asked her about it, if it was true or not, Ada threw her off the second tier in B Block. Nearly broke her neck.”
I’d known Ada in Happy Valley. The beautiful, shaven-headed Black woman never went anywhere except the visiting room without a cohort of followers, like most criminal overlords inside the prison. Dangerous women with heavy tattoos and severe cornrows, women who cleared the halls of looky-loos and beggars and potential threats before Ada arrived. At the time, Ada had been doing a stint for dealing guns, but all that followed her were tales of extreme violence, lines crossed and bones broken, warnings like the one Sneak had just given me about questioning her given name. I’d heard my fair share of dorm rumors about Ada. That she’d set a cell on fire with two women in it. That she’d kicked off a riot and killed a guard who was trying to blackmail her. I knew not all of it could be true, but the sheer number of rumors about her spoke of danger, of a menace much bigger and more powerful than me. Looking at Ada brought a tight, shallow feeling to my chest.
I’d been waiting for my lawyer to arrive in the visitor’s center one day, sitting with other inmates in a row of cubicles behind glass, when Ada arrived to visit with someone who I would later learn was her cousin. My lawyer was chronically late, so while I waited, trying not to listen to the conversations around me, I’d shuffled my chair back to the wall to get a better view of the women coming and going on visitor’s row. I’d heard a baby wailing and saw Ada’s cousin bend down and retrieve the infant from a stroller parked out of my view. She’d heaved the heavy baby to her chest, joggling it in a failed attempt to stop it crying. The baby was wriggling in its mother’s arms, trying to get free, sweaty cheeks and brow glistening as it shied away from the overhead lights. I watched as, presumably, the cousin explained the baby’s symptoms, pulling up the leg of the baby’s pants to reveal a swelling rash on the child’s thighs to Ada through the glass.
“Oh no,”
