Max Collins - Quarry in the middle

Which reminded me.

I’d had eleven thousand in cash on me. Surely part of the point of that roust in the alley had been to retrieve Jerry G’s poker losses; but I didn’t remember that happening. Not that I would, busy as I was getting the shit kicked out of me and bleeding out my nose and mouth.

“Could you bring me my pants?” I asked.

“You’re not getting up already?”

“No, I just want to check something.”

She jerked a thumb. “Well, I’m washing them, your shirt and pants. They were pretty filthy from that alley. But there was some stuff in the pockets.”

After disappearing briefly, she came in with my wallet and a thick fold of bills.

“You must have won,” she said, eyes big.

I counted it. Nothing was missing from the wallet, including the phony credit cards I was using.

Christ, they’d half-killed me, and left all that dough on me? Maybe they intended to clean me when they returned to take me for a ride. Or maybe the beating hadn’t been about the poker game at all. Maybe Jerry G’s pride in his own poker playing was too high to allow him to help himself to another player’s rightful winnings, even when he was planning to have that player beaten like a red-headed stepchild.

“What kind of boss is Jerry G?” I asked her.

She was perched on the edge of the bed again. “If you don’t cross him, he’s no problem. He doesn’t take a cut of my tips. If I sit and talk to a client, and get him to buy me a drink, that’s split between the house and the girl.”

“What does he pay you to dance?”

“Nothing.”

“You shitting me?”

“No. It’s strictly the dollars in our g’s, and the table dances and V.I.P. lounge tips. And we don’t date the customers. Jerry G says, if we want to do it for money, he’ll get us a little trailer out back.”

“What about Gigi?”

“Jerry G’s pop? He’s a nice enough old guy. He used to be a horndog, I hear-they say he used to audition all the girls who were tricking. But he’s been sick, lately.”

“How sick?”

“Well, I don’t know. But he goes to the doctor once a month. Otherwise, he hardly comes down from his suite. He sometimes has breakfast with Jerry G, at that little cafe downtown.”

“Not at the Wheelhouse restaurant?”

“No! Jerry G stays away from the Paddlewheel and the Wheelhouse. There’s a real rivalry there. The girls say Jerry G hates that guy, Cornell. Richard Cornell?”

“Ever been to the Paddlewheel?”

“No. That’s one world. The Lucky is another.”

“Pretty rough world, for a sweet kid like you.”

Her smile was a chin-crinkler. “Are you flirting?”

“Not yet. I just mean, prostitution, gambling, narcotics…”

“Those kinds of things have been around forever. Didn’t you ever hear of Sodom and Gomorrah?”

“Sodom, anyway. Doesn’t bother you?”

“I’m responsible only to myself, Jack. I have a nice body, and I don’t think being naked is sinful or evil or anything. If it makes men happy to see me dance, to feel my boobies in their face or put their hands on my bottom, that’s okay by me…long as they pay the freight. I have a kid to provide for. I don’t trick, and I don’t let anybody touch me in my private place.”

“Nobody ever?”

“Now you are flirting.”

“Maybe a little.”

She sighed, looked at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Her nails were painted hot pink. “Look, I know the Lucky is a rough place. It’s like…everybody has to put their time in, in some hellhole in this life. It’s an awful, corrupt place, and Jerry G is like the little Godfather of the place.”

“Running downtown Haydee’s Port isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things, is it?”

“Oh, it’s more than just the Lucky Devil-like, Jerry G runs all kinds of narcotics up and down the river. They have boats that look like, you know, summer outing kind of stuff. But you’d be shocked at how much of that… evil stuff moves through this tiny little town, and all across the country.”

“Were you raised a churchgoer, by any chance, Candace?”

“I went to a Baptist church when I was at home. I haven’t been in years. I don’t like church, really. But I believe in Jesus. Do unto others and all that stuff.”

“You must, hauling my ass out of that alley…You got any more of that Percodan?”

“I’ll get you another dose. But be careful-you don’t want to get hooked.”

I took the Percodan and went back to sleep for a while. When I woke up, the clock on the nightstand said one, and sunlight was still edging in around the dark curtains, so I didn’t figure I’d slept another day away or anything.

What was interesting was the presence of Candace next to me, under the sheets. Shouldn’t have surprised me, since this was her bed, after all, and she worked nights, and had to catch some rest some time.

She was sound asleep, even snoring a little, and wearing another t-shirt and sheer panties. She was nestled against me, with her head on my chest, my arm around her, her slender arm draped across my side.

I was just staring at her, wondering what my life would have been like if a sweet kid like this had married me back in the Nam days, and not a cheating little cunt.

I was also thinking about my close call-without her sweet nature and Baptist upbringing, I might have been dead right now, dumped in a ditch or maybe in the drink.

Seemed to me I had about come to the end of this way of life. I was lucky I hadn’t already been killed, trying to play the Broker’s database like a loose slot machine. I was dealing with murderers and their deserving clients, trying to play both ends against the middle, only I was always the guy in the middle, wasn’t I?

If I could make that substantial financial killing in Haydee’s Port, I might be able to invest in Wilma’s Welcome Inn and start living the kind of life actual human beings experienced. Maybe I could even find a nice kid like Candace, who had now turned her back to me. I risked turning onto my side, and didn’t die of a hemorrhage, so I spooned with her. She snuggled her bottom against my groin and a mighty oak grew.

She began giggling, in her sleep maybe, and a hand reached around, and found my dick and stroked it like a puppy, while I purred like a kitten. She turned over and whispered, “Sam’s napping, so…” And she gave me the finger-to-the-lips shush sign.

Then her right hand slipped in the front of my jockey shorts and withdrew the only part of me that was throbbing in a good way, and her little mouth with the full lips suckled on the tip, then began to slide up and down, her tongue working miracles that had surely not been revealed to her at the Baptist Church.

She had me to the brink, when she stopped and asked, “You want to come this way? Or do you feel good enough to…?”

Keeping faith with her Baptist roots, I got on her Missionary style, but only after she had slipped out of the panties and pulled off the t-shirt. Her pert breasts stayed that way, on her back, and when I slipped inside her, she was so tight, she might have been holding me in her fist.

It lasted a surprisingly long time, and I felt every ache and pain from the other night but somehow it only added to the sensation. She looked up at me with that face free of makeup, looking only twelve but fucking like twenty, her expression begging mercy, understanding and forgiveness. What she got turned her chest and neck and cheeks scarlet and made her nipples point skyward and her eyes the same direction with her mouth making a little O to go with the big one.

Me, I came so hard my soul might have been escaping me, if it hadn’t fled long before.

We did that darn near silently, not waking Sam from his nappy-poo, and she took a shower and I took a shower and we both sat, fully dressed now, at a little table off her kitchen nook, feeling vaguely embarrassed, yet knowing we’d made a memory that neither of us would ever lose, at least till she died of natural causes and somebody put a bullet in my head.