Hard Case Crime: Money Shot (16 page)

I looked up at Malloy. I was so surprised by this unexpected soliloquy that I didn’t know what to say. Lalo Malloy, spontaneously sharing an intimate anecdote. With me. Something subtle and strange had happened between us. I had no idea what to make of it.

I looked out the window. Sherman Oaks became Valley Village and then North Hollywood as we zigzagged back toward Malloy’s place. I drank little sips of water, trying to find my voice, trying to set aside what I’d done and how totally alien everything felt and focus back on the problem at hand.

“What the hell happened to Lia?” I finally made myself ask. “Do you think she saw the weasel and his pal and took off?”

“Maybe,” Malloy said. “Maybe they already got her and were just waiting for us.”

“Now what?”

“Now we need to get that 2257 information you mentioned for PDM Video,” Malloy said. “See if we can get a drivers license on Lia.”

“We can probably get it online at your place,” I said.

Malloy nodded and ground out his cigarette in the ashtray.

“Do you have a breath mint or something?” I asked.

“Glove box,” Malloy said.

I opened the glove box and dug through maps and napkins and things until I found a tin of Altoids. I popped it open and took one. Malloy turned onto Hollywood Way. As the candy dissolved on my tongue, the details of the events in the parking lot started to dissolve as well. Part of me felt it was important to hang on to them, to savor them in all their ugliness. But there was another part of me that was just as glad to let them go.

We drove in silence. Malloy turned onto his street and parked a few doors down from his place. I followed him along the sidewalk and over toward the door to the apartment complex.

“You know,” I said. “This is gonna sound really weird, but I’m kinda hungry all of a sudden.”

Inexplicably, Malloy froze. He did not reply. His body language turned simultaneously tense and fluid, like a cat that had just spotted a mouse. He slowly reached out and wrapped his fingers around my upper arm.

“What?” I asked.

“My wallet,” he said. “I—”

Before he could finish the sentence, there was a sharp, sudden Fourth of July pop and a puff of plaster dust exploded from the wall about an asshair away from the left side of Malloy’s head.

“Go!” he said, shoving me ahead of him so hard I nearly fell.

I have no idea how I managed to keep my feet under me and Malloy behind me as we barreled down the sidewalk with those firecracker pops going off all around us. That cliché you always hear about how everything goes into slow motion at times like this is kind of true, but also kind of not. The world around me was suddenly way too bright and sharp, everything crystal clear and intensely significant, but it also seemed like things were happening before my mind had time to sort them out. Like my brain was just a befuddled old grandma in my body’s backseat, demanding to know where on earth we were going in such a hurry.

The next thing I knew my cheek was pressed against the battered door of an old Chevy Nova. Either the pops had stopped or I had gone totally deaf. All I could hear was ringing inside my ears. It seemed pretty comfortable and safe down there by the Nova and I felt like maybe I could use a little nap, but Malloy was dragging me again, impatient fingers digging into me and forcing me to leave the comfy Nova behind. He pushed me into his SUV through the driver’s side door. I hit my chin on the steering wheel and nearly impaled myself on the gearshift but he was right behind me, shoving me aside, cranking the ignition and stomping on the gas before the door was even shut.

I thought I couldn’t hear anymore but I was wrong. The sound of the rear windshield shattering was like the end of the world.

“Jesus!” Malloy said, wrenching the wheel from left to right and then reaching under the seat for my gun.

I guess you could call what happened next a car chase. It was probably pretty spectacular and exciting, with lots of near misses and bullets flying all around. I’m sure it would have been a blast to watch in a movie theater, but I’ll tell you what, it’s not nearly as much fun when you’re jammed down into the place under the dashboard where your feet go, arms wrapped around your head and screaming at the top of your lungs, slamming from side to side like improperly stowed luggage and wishing you would die in a fiery wreck already, just to get it over with. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my life.

But we didn’t die in a fiery wreck. I felt the car slow, then stop and it took me a few seconds to get up the guts to uncover my face and risk a peek at our surroundings.

We were over by the L.A. River. There were no other cars in sight. Feeling beaten up all over again, I slowly unfolded myself from under the dashboard and crawled up into the passenger seat. My heart was still pounding so hard it felt like it was going to bust out like a baby alien and run off down the street.

I looked over at Malloy. He was gripping the wheel, breathing hard through his nose, his mouth a thin, tight line. He had a rapid tic in the bunched muscle at the hinge of his jaw and there was blood running down his neck, into the collar of his shirt. His right earlobe looked like a piece of red chewing gum.

There was a strange, indefinable charge in the air between us that felt almost sexual in its intensity but neither one of us did anything about it. We just sat like that for several minutes. Separate, not speaking. The motor idled. A sparrow perched in one of the diamonds on a nearby chain link fence. My heart slowly returned to a normal pace.

“I lost my wallet,” Malloy said.

I frowned.

“What?”

“In the parking lot, back at the mall,” he squinted at the sparrow. “My pocket got torn while I was fighting with that guy you popped.” He tugged at the ragged flap in his trousers. “I guess my wallet must’ve fallen out.”

“Fuck,” I said softly. “Is that how they found your address?”

“Could have been a lot worse,” Malloy said, putting the car into gear. “Cops could have found it. My wallet next to a dead body. That would have been tough to explain.”

“Guess that means the bad guys found the body first, huh?” I said. “Think they took it?”

Malloy nodded and lit a cigarette.

“They don’t want cops in this any more than we do,” he said.

“Do we still need to get rid of the gun?” I asked.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Malloy said. “Don’t worry, I’ll get you another one.”

“Now what?” I asked.

I looked away. I felt bad for dragging Malloy into this mess but he didn’t seem all that sorry. He just smoked.

“For now, I say we hole up somewhere anonymous,” he said. “Somewhere with a DVD player.”

That’s how we wound up at the Palmview Court Motel.

The Palmview Court Motel got one thing right. The tiny office did feature a view of a dry, brown, rat-infested palm tree slowly dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. Most of the Palmview’s downwardly mobile clientele probably never bothered to look out their windows, since they were busy looking at the stained ceiling while turning tricks or at the insides of their eyelids while nodding out with needles in their arms. Not much in the charm department, but every room boasted its own DVD player, built into the bolted-down television.

The scrawny, hyperanimated tweaker behind the desk had a shoebox full of cheap porn compilation DVDs that a handwritten sign offered for two dollars a piece. When I asked about the DVD players, he rattled the box at me in a manner that I guess was meant to be enticing.

“The queer ones are mostly toward the bottom,” the guy told me, weird blue eyes jittering around like they were trying to figure out a way to escape from their sockets. “Not that I got anything against queers. Takes all kinds, I guess. Anyway, if you return the DVD when you’re done you can have one of your dollars back.”

I kept on forgetting that I was supposed to be a boy. I couldn’t help but wonder what Malloy thought about being constantly mistaken for some kind of gay Daddy. If it bothered him, he never let it show.

The DVDs in the box were the kind that promise
SIX SIZZLING HOURS OF NONSTOP XXX ACTION
but actually feature one so-so scene with a girl you’ve maybe heard of, along with endless hours of swimmy European crap from 1985. I didn’t bother to dig for the gay ones. I was afraid to look too closely at the ones on top, in case there might be one of mine in there.

“No
Naughty Teens,”
Malloy said, rifling through the box as I checked us in with cash and tried to avoid looking at the desk clerk’s manic rictus of gray, rotten teeth. He bobbed and twitched nonstop behind the desk, like a puppet made out of beef jerky.

“Yeah well,” the clerk replied. “If you don’t see one you like, there’s Le Sex Shoppe over on Van Nuys. Tell ’em Reno from the Palm sent you and you’ll get a discount.”

“Great,” I said, feeling like I needed to wash my brain.

“Let’s go,” Malloy said.

Although I’d driven right past Le Sex Shoppe a billion times, I’d never actually been inside. I could get pretty much any dirty DVD I wanted for free since I used to write reviews for
AVN
and I got free toys from Doc Johnson because I used their stuff exclusively on our Web site. There’d never really been a reason for me to go to a place like Le Sex Shoppe. Until now.

A lot of people are surprised that these kinds of places are still booming, considering the fact that everything is available on the Internet. The truth is, there are still plenty of guys who share computers with their wives, guys who don’t own computers, or guys who just prefer to pay cash for their smut. Places like that also feature video booths so guys with too much feminine supervision at home can rub out a quick one on their lunch hour.

“Here,” Malloy said, indicating a row of similarly packaged DVDs in the amateur section. Sure enough, it was
Naughty Teens
.

Seeing them all side by side like that, I was suddenly hit with the sheer number of girls involved in this nasty business. There were twenty-one DVDs in a tidy row. Each DVD contained four or five scenes. Sure, there were a few repeats but still, that meant there had been nearly a hundred girls involved in this sex slave racket. It must cost a pretty penny to buy, house, feed and most importantly keep secret, such a large group of illegal foreign women. I couldn’t imagine the meager sales of these DVDs alone provided enough income to make something like that profitable enough to be worth the risk.

I shared my thoughts with Malloy.

“It just seems odd to me that they don’t bother to really shoot the hell out of each girl,” I said. “A busy actress can shoot twenty-five scenes a month even without a gun to her head. These girls only do one or two scenes each. Why not get the maximum value out of their investments?”

“Lia said she’d been forced into prostitution, not just porno,” Malloy said. He examined the DVD cover featuring “Kimberly” and Jesse Black. “My guess is these DVDs are just video catalogs thrown together to show off the available merchandise. The prostitution is probably where they make the real money.”

“Jesus,” I said softly.

“So,” Malloy said. “Let’s get that 2257 information.”

Back at the Palmview, we settled into the dumpy room. It sucked, but at least no one was trying to shoot us.

The first thing I did was lock myself in the bathroom and unwind my binders. I was moist and sour from adrenaline and fear sweat and I felt like I would die if I didn’t rinse off. There was no soap and the rusty, lukewarm water dribbled out of the showerhead like blood from the wrist of a reluctant suicide. Still, it was better than nothing.

When I got out of the shower, I dried myself gingerly with the bathroom’s single rough, sort-of-white towel and then paused. There was a long skinny mirror on the back of the bathroom door, offering up a slightly warped view of my naked body from the knees up. Naked, it was impossible to pretend to be someone else.

I touched my scalp. My chin. My belly. The bruises had faded to the point where you could almost pretend they were shadows. I took out the red lipstick I had stolen from Tabby and put some on. It sounds so weird now, but looking in the mirror at myself with those shiny red lips made me feel alive. Sexy. Real. They made me feel like me again. I decided in that moment that I would wear lipstick when I killed the bastard who set me up.

Malloy knocked softly on the door and I jumped, quickly wiping my lips on the back of my hand.

“Just a second,” I said, putting the lipstick back in the pocket of my duffel bag that used to hold the gun.

I put on the clean t-shirt that wasn’t the Lakers shirt. It was red and plain. Long, like a dress, like Lia’s had been. I couldn’t face the ace bandages again just yet so I gave my tits a break and let them be.

Malloy went silently into the bathroom after I came out. While he washed up, I called Roxette’s cell again. It still went straight to voicemail. No one picked up at her house either. After that, I spent way too long battling the plastic wrap and all the security stickers holding the
Naughty Teens 17
DVD case shut. I was inches from flinging the damn thing out the window when Malloy came out of the bathroom, water beaded on his silver buzzcut and the crusted blood gone from beneath his ear. I handed the case over. He calmly slit the wrapping with a small pocketknife and extracted the disk.

He put in the DVD and I sat back on the bed. A red FBI warning came up, then the 2257 information.

This motion picture “NAUGHTY TEENS 17” was produced on July 12th 2006. The records required by U.S.C. Sec 2257 and 28 C.R.F. Part 25 for this motion picture and on any related materials to which this notice is affixed are kept at the offices of the manufacturer, PDM Productions, located at 13505 Cielo Street, Chatsworth CA 91311 by the custodian of records, B. Handerlan. All persons who appear in this video are over 18 years of age. For adult viewing only. Exercise your rights as an adult American citizen and enjoy all of the fine XXX videos available from PDM Productions.

There was no way to pause it, since there was no remote, but Malloy didn’t seem to need to. He just wrote the address down. While he was writing, the menu came up. A large still of a brunette who wasn’t Lia, looking more bewildered than sexy, filled the right side of the screen. The title was beneath her and a large square to the left framed a repeating trailer cobbled together from clips from the various scenes. One of the scenes was Lia with Jesse. Just seeing him made me feel physically sick. Malloy stood and hit stop. The screen went gray, but it didn’t make me feel better.