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“Why? Late to work too often?”

She didn't laugh. Instead she kept applying the makeup to her face. “I used to be flat and it was OK when I made lesbian movies,” she said in a monotone, almost like she was in a hypnotic state. “But I wanted implants.”

“What's that have to do with anything?”

“My boss said he'd pay for my implants if I did heterosexual movies too. And I could pay him back from my salary.”

“How much would you make from one movie?”

“Between two-fifty and five hundred.”

“Obviously you got the implants. So what went wrong?”

“I don't like sex with guys but I did it anyway. Thing was, I couldn't swallow. It always made me gag and choke and then I'd throw up.”

She stopped talking and started lining her eyes with a dark pencil.

“So what happened then?”

“Boss told me that I'd have to swallow or else.”

“Or else what?”

“He'd make me flat again.”

She turned around toward me, pulled up her black tank top with the script word ANGEL stenciled on the front in silver glitter, and stood there flashing me with those big fake cans.

“Jesus,” I gasped, staring at the vertical scars running like railroad tracks across both solid breasts.

“He sliced my upper thighs and my ass too.”

Her hands started to go the silver belt buckle on her black jeans. “I believe you,” I said quickly. “Where's the guy now?”

“Until today, in jail. But this morning the detective called me and told me he bailed out. And that he's looking to kill me so I don't go to court against him.”

There was something pitiful about this loser. Maybe she was a slut but she didn't deserve to be carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

I tried to cheer her up a little. “If you go to court and he's got a shitty lawyer, he'll go to jail, and if you're lucky somebody will kill him there.”

“I hope so,” she muttered dully.

I poured some paint in the roller pan and started painting where I left off. About ten minutes later I left the room to go to the bathroom down the hall when some sandy-haired guy with black-rimmed glasses over his moon-shaped face stopped me.

“You know where Marissa is?” he mumbled with Dentyne-smelling breath.

“Second door,” I said, pointing.

Walking back a few minutes later I heard loud banging sounds coming from the bedroom! I ran to the closed door, raced inside the room, and saw the sandy-haired guy standing in front of the closed closet door kicking the shit out of it while Marissa's muffled voice cried out for help from inside the closet.

“What're you doing?” I yelled. “She's leaving town! She's not testifying against you!”

He slipped a silver butterfly knife out of his tan pants pocket, opened the knife and smiled. “I'm guaranteeing that.”

“I'm calling the cops!” I screamed, racing to the doorway.

Outside in the hallway I hurriedly dialed Dr. Baylitt's office. Luckily the old hag hadn't died of emphysema yet.

“Yes?” she wheezed.

“This is Kurt Stafford,” I quickly whispered. “I just left your office a little while ago when I tried to get you to change my grade. Remember?”

“Certainly,” began the adverb game again.

I heard the swooshing sound of what must've been her exhaling cigarette smoke.

“You told me to call when I had another news tip.”

“Absolutely.”

“Right now! Call NEWSTIP! Murder is about to happen at the Venice Battered Women's Shelter.” I gave her the address. “Call immediately! And remember it was me who called you.”

“Exclusively?”

“What do you mean?”

This must've gotten her attention; she spoke in a whole sentence.

“All news and TV stations have police and fire scanners.
Once you call 911 every station goes to the scene.”

“Yeah. This is exclusive. You're the only person I called. Not even the cops know about it.”

“Undoubtedly?”

“Yeah. Don't you call the cops. Call NEWSTIP now. Then in five minutes I'll call the cops.”

Forgetting to thank me, she hung up. I ran downstairs and got the rest of the guys together.

“Some asshole is upstairs trying to kill one of the girls in the bedroom I'm painting! Kicking in the closet door she's hiding in. And he's flashing a big knife!”

Batman yanked his cell phone out of his back pocket. “I'll call the cops!”

“I already did,” I lied.

“Let's go back upstairs,” he said. “We got to help her.”

“Yeah,” Rawlings added, “let's go!”

We charged up the stairs with Rawlings in the lead. He opened the door slowly and we walked inside. The room was empty.

“Anybody here?” I called out bravely.

A girl's voice nervously squeeked from behind the closet door. “Is he gone?”

“Yeah,” Rawlings answered and the ashen-faced girl slowly walked back into the room.

About fifteen minutes later while everybody was downstairs, Dung pointed out the front window, “Look out there. That's the NEWSTIP van.”

“Where's the cops?” Rainey asked me. “When did you call?”

“Right before I told you what happened. You saw me on the phone.”

He nodded a little. “Yeah.”

“Maybe I better get rid of the news people,” I said walking to the door.

I went outside and over to the two guys who were standing at the curb next to their white van. “Sorry. False alarm,” I said to the blond guy who was the same guy who tried to interview me after the robbery at the check cashing place. The other guy
with him was real thin and looked like a half and half mulatto, carrying a big video camera on his right shoulder. “But we'll call you if we see or hear anything,” I added.

The zebra guy reached into his shirt pocket and took out a silver business card holder. He handed me a card.

“Here's the number for our direct line. Call it and get your anonymous code number. We pay up to a thousand bucks for something good.”

“How good?”

“An exclusive,” the blond guy interrupted in a big stage voice. “Preferably visual violence.”

“Like what? A murder in progress?”

“Something like that.”

4:55
P.M
.

H
ECTOR'S SMILE WOULD GET MOST GIRLS' PANTIES STICKY
.
“I'm taking over tonight as the manager of an adult motel in Venice, not too far from here,” he told us in the front room of the Shelter. “You guys can hide in the walkway and see lots of pussy.”

“What do you mean?” Rickshaw Boy asked, almost drooling.

Hector was still wearing the same white, neck collar that some quack provided to beef up his fake accident claim. He kept smiling absent-mindedly like he was watching on a TV monitor what he was about to tell us.

“The owners of the motel have this walking space behind the wall facing the bed in every room. And without the people in the room knowing it, they video the couples having sex through a corner of a two-way mirror hanging over the chest of drawers across from the bed.”

“No shit,” Dung asked, with a dreamy look in his eyes.

Hector was salivating too. “Yeah. So if you guys come over tonight I'll let you in the walking space and you can inspect the
Poon Tang Palace.”

“That's really the name?” Lyman asked.

“No. The three brothers who own it, they named it THE PALACE but we call it the Poon Tang Palace since getting poon is what's happening in the rooms.” Hector thought about something and laughed. “Originally they wanted to call it THE BEARDED CLAM but the city wouldn't give them a business license in that name.” He handed Grossberg a pussy-pink colored business card. “Here's the address. Any time after nine.”

“We'll be there tonight,” I answered. “Guarantee it.”

_____

7:00
P.M
.

“My tongue reaches my forehead,” Parker said into the phone in his bedroom following another random call where he'd ask any girl who answered the phone, Do you fuck? “That's all you need to know about me,” he continued conversationally as if he was dialing 411. “What do you look like?…Sticky wet cunt?…Great….Yeah, I can bring some guys over. How much?…Fifty's too much….Thirty-five each?…OK….Yeah, I know how to get to Torrance. Give me your address.” He scribbled it down on the back of an envelope. “It's near LAX, right?…I know where it is. We'll be there around nine. Oh, what's your name?…OK Bonnie. Stay moist….I'm Brad Pitt.”

Parker hung up and looked over at me and Rawlings who were straightening up his room.

“You look like shit in that hat,” he muttered to me.

Strong and muscular from working out and taking steroids, he had a hair-trigger temper that nobody wanted to mess with. That's why I made sure to wear that Marine cap every time I was in the house.

Parker looked at Rawlings. “You can come tonight but I don't know about Stafford.”

“Why can't I go?“

“Cause I can't stand the sight of you.”

Rawlings started laughing. I looked back at Parker blandly.

Parker was silent for a few seconds checking my reaction. “OK, you can come. I guess it doesn't matter. All the pledges can come. Be inside the truck at eight-thirty. Then the Trojan Horse will race away!”

_____

The truck bed was full of pledges and a few actives. Adams was looking up at us, with one hand on one of the back doors ready to slam it shut when he stopped. “When we get back later tonight, all the actives will be at the house to vote again,” he said.

“No,” Stovepipe interrupted. “We already voted out the pledge for tonight.”

Adams shot him a look that screamed shut up!

“I mean we're going to vote when we get back,” Stovepipe mumbled feebly, convincing nobody.

“No we're not,” Adams answered. “Stovepipe's right. We voted earlier today since a lot of actives couldn't be here later.” The silence in the truck was creepy as his soft voice bounced loudly off all three walls. “There's a pledge in here that's already been voted tonight's dead man.”

_____

“There it is!” Parker pointed triumphantly, like Columbus sighting land, to a run-down, gray house whose owners never knew that paint was invented. “I'm first,” he screamed, sprinting across the street with the rest of us chasing him like lunatics.

Most of the houses on the street looked like the ones National Geographic photographed of slums in Haiti.

We got to the rickety wooden porch that luckily didn't cave in from our combined weight. Immediately Parker banged his right fist on the chipped, wooden front door. Nobody answered.

“Over here!” a girl's voice called out from the side of the house.

“Remember I'm first!” Parker yelled, pushing past us back down the stairs.

He rushed around to the side of the house with the rest of us
still right behind him. Then he banged on the side door that had a dirty uncovered window in the center. The door opened in a second.

A pimply, heavy-set girl about twenty-five, at least as tall as Parker, stood in the doorway, with stringy, copper-tinted hair that had three inches of dark roots crawling out of her scalp.

“You Bonnie?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

She smiled, probably relaxing from her night job as a Roller Derby blocker, while exhibiting at the same time every make-up product that Revlon made. Then she opened the door fully, standing there wearing only a knee-high pink nightgown and purple stiletto heels.

“Come on in,” she said enticingly.

We followed her inside, through a tiny bedroom with its unmade bed, down a small hallway cluttered with dirty clothes on the floor, and into the dingy living room that smelled of incense.

“Please sit down,” she said to the nearly two dozen of us, pointing to a small, purple, velvet-looking couch that would barely seat three midgets.

The whole place looked like it was furnished from Salvation Army rejects. It had probably been a while since this house was featured in
Town&Country
.

Nobody sat down. Bonnie stood in front of the fireplace that looked like a home-made altar of some kind and pointed to the worn purple couch that was probably sperm-infested.

“Please sit down,” she repeated in a deep voice that sounded like it began at a truck stop somewhere between the Texas and Oklahoma border.

Dung and Bones risked getting leprosy and sat on the tiny couch. Stovepipe plopped down and surrendered to a big, red, overstuffed chair in the corner. The rest of us optioned out for the threadbare, green rug.

We were facing Bonnie, whose back was to the fireplace, while she faced the front door.

“Want to check me out?” she asked like a used-car salesman.

“Yeah!” me and my horny pledge brothers screamed out, clapping and cheering like sex-starved sailors returning from year-long submarine duty.

She stepped out of the nightgown, standing there in her high heels completely naked. She tossed the nightgown to Dung, who immediately started sniffing the crotch.

As bad as she looked, I was starting to get aroused.

“Let's see your snatch up close,” Parker called out lustily.

“Sure, honey,” Bonnie said, walking up to Parker and thrusting her pussy at his outstretched, quivering tongue.

He lurched forward to try to kiss it but she jumped back and laughed. “Pretty soon,” she said, before walking around and giving everybody else the same close-up view of the furry-covered merchandise.

Her twat had such a magnetic effect on us that nobody noticed anybody coming in the front door and standing behind us until it was too late!