Crashed

office, like a relatively good hand of cards that might prevail with skillful play now looked like muck.

And I wasn’t just frightened for myself. I was frightened for Thistle, for Doc, for Louie, for anyone who had done or was going to do anything at all to help me try to get out of this mess with my skin and my ethics, such as they were, intact. And, of course, I was worried about the spatter effect, especially where Rina and Kathy were concerned. I couldn’t let anything endanger them. And Hacker, that multifaceted son of a bitch, had, at least obliquely, threatened Rina.

Another reason to put Hacker in a different category.

Around three-fifteen, I got honest with myself and stopped pretending I was going to drop off to sleep just any minute now. I got up, turned on the lights, and wandered around the room. The rooms at the Snor-Mor offer a minimum of wandering area, complemented by a minimum number of items of interest. Finally, out of desperation at the sheer absence of anything useful to do, I turned on CNN and spent about forty-five minutes watching the coverage of Thistle Downing’s emergence from obscurity to star in a porno flick, tastefully referred to as an adult film. I got to see myself deck the lady reporter a couple of times-that was what they’d chosen as the promo-and watched myself standing next to Thistle at the press conference. I could see why Kathy had gotten so upset; I looked like some human trafficking enforcer who’d been stationed there to break her spine if she got out of line.

Thistle had predicted the angles precisely. CNN went with what she had characterized as the compassionate approach: “Isn’t it tragic? That cute little girl turned out to be a slut.” The surprise was that they spent quite a bit of the segment on excerpts from the press conference in which Thistle excoriated the ladies and gentlemen who had turned out, and then cut to some brief street interviews of people who, by and large, agreed with her. The general consensus seemed to be that the press was a bunch of scumbags, that they were interested only in bad news and cheap angles, and that they should leave the poor kid alone. These compelling tidbits were followed by a very carefully worded piece, a piece many lawyers had reviewed, about the possibility of there being crime-family money behind the enterprise. When the CNN all-night anchorwoman, who was attractively weary-looking, or maybe it was just me, promised an upcoming editorial on The Media: Are We Out of Control?, I turned off the set and looked for something else, anything else, to do.

And there, jammed provocatively into her four-color box, was Dora.

I unwrapped her and blew her up, which turned out to be a lot harder than it sounded. By the time she was sitting propped up in the armchair opposite the bed, looking at me with a certain passive interest, I had spots floating in front of my eyes. I checked the package for a health warning, something like DO NOT ATTEMPT SEXUAL ACTIVITY WHILE HYPERVENTILATED, but it seemed as though Wattles hadn’t had his legal team evaluate the language on the box. If he had, I thought, there would be more of those infuriating cautions for the clueless that have become such a permanent part of the American landscape: DO NOT FILL WITH MOLTEN LEAD. DO NOT USE ON LIGHTED STOVE. DO NOT SHARE WITH STRANGERS. DO NOT INFLATE AND TAKE TO DENTIST.

There was one nice lawyerly touch: in small print on the back of the package were the words MODEL WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER AT TIME OF MANUFACTURE. I knew for a fact that that was true. So Wattles, whatever other kinds of nefarious activity he might be engaged in, wasn’t promoting plastic pedophilia. I found myself wondering whether there might not be a worldwide underground traffic in used department-store mannequins of children. Somewhere, I figured, there was probably a catalog.

Catalog, I thought. Good idea; here was something useful I could do. I went online, brought up Google, and typed MY SWEET INFLATABLE YOU, hoping this query wasn’t being electronically filed in an indelible record of my online activities by some gray government bureau. Wham! With the absolute moral neutrality that makes Google so perversely fascinating, it filled my screen with a whole bouquet of hits. And the very first one had everything I needed, and more: a picture of Dora at her most alluring (high-definition version available), the price, some truly unsettling prose about her capabilities, a couple of even more unsettling endorsements from happy customers, and-almost too good to be true-Wattles’s mailing address for those who wished to pay with checks or money orders rather than having Visa or Mastercard know they were buying inflatable companionship.

I printed five copies of the page, using glossy paper for the full effect. Then I killed half an hour writing the letter I planned to roll up in Dora’s open mouth when it came time for her to take center stage. It was good, even by my strict editorial standards.

“You’re going out there a limp bag of latex,” I said to Dora. “But you’re coming back a star.”

I thought it would be polite for her to answer me, so I pressed her left ear, expecting either, “Oh, Baby” or “Don’t stop now,” or maybe both of them together to show I was someone special, not just another guy with a good pair of lungs. Nothing. I pressed the right ear, and I have to admit that pressing either ear was mildly creepy- feeling. Not a word, not a syllable, not a perfunctory appreciative moan. In addition to being a second-rate burglar, a bad planner, a danger to those around me, and someone whose personal clock was set on fast forward, I couldn’t get a cheap rise out of a blow-up doll.

I picked up the package, and my spirits lifted: in print that was smaller than most punctuation marks were the words, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED.

Okay. It wasn’t me. I went to sleep.

“Geez, I’m sorry,” Louie said in the doorway. “Didn’t know you had company.”

I’d shot halfway across the room, traveling eight inches above the carpet, at the sound of the door opening, and I stood there now, panting, trapped somewhere between the adrenaline rush of panic and the post-sleep fog of no-coffee-yet. “Jesus,” I said. “Don’t do that. And look a little closer before you apologize to the lady.”

“Holy smoke,” Louie said, peering at Dora. He’d come in from a bright morning and the room was as dim as I’d been able to make it. He looked concerned. “You know, Junior,” he said slowly, “you’re not what I call handsome, but you’re not a bad-looking guy. I mean, Alice knows some girls she could introduce …” His voice trailed off. “She looks a lot like somebody,” he said.

I said, “Doesn’t she.”

Louie said, “You’re fuckin’ kidding me” in the tone of someone who has just seen the Virgin Mary in a swirl of powdered coffee creamer. He came the rest of the way into the room and tugged a lock of Dora’s Dynel hairdo. “I mean, same hair and everything.”

“We should try to be gentlemen,” I said. “Neither of us knows about the everything part.”

“Oh, man,” Louie said. “This is dynamite.”

“Take it from me,” I said. “It’s harder to blow up.”

He looked around the room. “You thought about the maid?” he asked. “She’s gonna take one look at that and run all the way back to Venezuela.”

“You’re right. I probably need to stash her.” I unplugged the little valve on her back and started to press on her to push the air out. “You want to help?”

“Not on your life,” he said, sitting as far away as the room allowed.

“Just asking.” I found that I was trying to avoid pressing on her, um, sensitive areas. I put her on the floor and sat on her and was rewarded by a nice long hiss.

“Got your gun, I think,” Louie said, watching me. “The thing you want, it uses CO2 cartridges, right?”

“I don’t know. Sounds right. Not noisy anyway.”

“Makes a little noise like phut,” Louie said.

Dora was shrinking nicely. “Like what?” I wanted to hear him say it again.

“Like phut you,” Louie said. “I don’t mind being laughed at, but I like to get paid for it.”

“If this works out,” I said, “I’ll have ten K for you day after tomorrow.”

“Ten K counts,” Louie said. “What if it doesn’t work out?”

“You can sue my estate. What about the car?”

“It’s the old LAPD black-and-white,” Louie said. “What do you want Willie to write on the door?”

“Pacific Security.”

Louie made a mouth. “Not much of a ring to it.”

“I know, but I’ve got a shirt that says that, and they might as well match.”

“You’re the only guy I know,” Louie said, “gets a car to match his shirt.” He made a sound that probably