Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

The sedan trundled around the corner to a small parking lot, and I followed. The driver cut the engine, and I slid into the passenger seat.

“How you doing?” he said.

I shrugged, studying him from behind my mask of pallid makeup. His age was hard to judge. Mid-thirties, maybe. I’d read it off his driver’s license when I made the bust.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Sarah,” I said.

“Sarah,” he repeated. “My name’s Gareth. You can call me Gary. Most people do.”

The sound of the Ozarks in his voice was disarming, but I went forward with business. “What’s on your mind tonight, Gary?”

He didn’t take the hint. “I’m staying in town tonight, on my way up north, to do some fishing.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I saw your pole in the back.”

He gave me a small smile. “I designed that pole,” he said. “That’s what I do for a living. Well, I do a couple of things. That’s one of them. You want a smoke?”

“No, thanks,” I told him.

“Well, I’m gonna have one,” he said.

Usually the men are nervous, and in a hurry. This man acted like we’d just sat down together at a lounge for cocktails. He was entirely at ease, rolling down his window to exhale with almost lordly pleasure. “Yeah,” he said reflectively, “I heard you’ve got some of the best fishing in America, up in your lake country. Is that true?”

“I don’t fish,” I said lamely. I’d never had to make small talk with a john before. This really was not going well at all.

“Some friends told me I should come,” he went on. “My wife died a few years ago. I haven’t taken any vacation time since then.”

His eyelashes were black, much darker than the rest of his fair coloring would have indicated, when his gaze flicked downward as if he were shy about saying that last part. I wondered if he’d been with another woman in those years he’d referred to, or if he was trying to work up to making me the first. And I imagined myself standing before a judge someday, not long from now, and explaining that in a world full of men who beat up prostitutes, spent the milk money on sex, and brought diseases home to their wives, I had gone out on the streets on Hennepin County’s behalf and caught a courteous, widowed fishing pole designer.

“ Gary,” I said, straightening, “are you ever going to ask me for sex?”

He blinked, but I thought I saw a flicker of amusement behind his thick glasses. “Are all you Minnesotans in this big a hurry?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “I can’t speak for all Minnesotans, especially since I come from out West, but in my case it has a lot to do with the fact that I’m a Hennepin County Sheriff’s detective. And if you suggest some kind of sex-for-money deal, then I’m going to have to arrest you, and I’d really rather not do that if it’s all the same to you. I’m guessing it is.”

Gary, who had come perilously close to dropping his cigarette from his mouth onto his lap, said, “You’re a cop?”

“On my good days,” I said, and opened the door to the Chevy and climbed out. Then I turned in the doorway. “One last thing,” I said.

I’d been planning to leave him with an admonition to leave the working girls alone while in Minneapolis, but then I saw something I should have noticed before. His hand, resting on the steering wheel, had a warm tone from the sun even where it wasn’t freckled. All except for a slightly paler line on the ring finger. The tan line was too recent for the passage of time he’d been widowed. He’d been wearing the ring much longer. My glib words dried up in my throat. “Never mind,” I said.

That should have been the end of it, but Gareth’s voice caught up with me.

“Sarah,” he said.

I turned back.

“Be safe,” he said.

It was an unexpected kindness, and I merely nodded, not knowing what I might have said.

Perhaps five minutes of pacing my spot again let me recover my composure, even a little bit of bravado. That made two men I’d let slip through my net tonight. The next guy so much as looks at my ass, I thought, I swear to God, I’m going to arrest him.

The next car was a gleaming dove-gray sedan. Again a window rolled down, and I leaned over to look in. A middle-aged man sat behind the wheel, slender, balding, a little Mediterranean-looking, wearing a well-tailored suit.

“May I offer you a ride?” he asked.

“Why don’t you pull around the corner,” I said, “and we can talk for a minute, okay?”

Unlike Gary, this man had no interest in learning my name, although he told me I could call him Paul. The car’s interior smelled new, and a sticker identified it as part of a rental fleet. Paul was from out of town.

“What’s on your mind tonight, Paul?” I asked.

“I thought you might want to make a little deal,” he said. “Do you like coke?”

I looked at him sidewise. Better and better, a soliciting bust with a side of narcotics possession. “Who doesn’t?” I said.

“I thought maybe with a few lines you could go down to fifty dollars for a half-and-half.”

Just what the world needs, a frugal john. “Seventy-five.”

“That’s fine.” Paul’s heart wasn’t in the negotiation.

“And I need to see the blow first.”

“It’s right back there, in my briefcase,” he said, indicating the backseat with a slight wave of his hand. “Do you have, ah, someplace we can go?”

Ignoring him, I rose to my knees and turned, pulling his slender briefcase onto the front seat with us. “Is this thing locked?” I asked, but didn’t wait before I pressed the release with my thumb. It snapped noisily, and I opened the case. There it was, such a world of trouble for this guy in such a little plastic bag.

Paul was unfazed by my coarse behavior. Paul was a man of the world. He knew that an expensive suit pays for itself in the long run, that business class is a rip-off, and that $75 hookers give their johns a hard time. As I snapped the briefcase shut, Paul restated his earlier question.

“So,” he asked, “do you have somewhere that you take men?”

“I sure do,” I told him cheerfully, pulling my shield out of my leather coat.

Itwas after four in the morning when I left work, after staying late to cover for a co-worker whose child was sick. But even when I left, I wasn’t tired, just hungry. I was thinking that if I knocked on the back door of a bakery, I might be able to buy something really fresh and warm from the oven.

It was on this errand, which took me toward the outskirts of the city, that I saw a woman refilling a Star Tribune rack. Impulse made me pull to the side of the road. Shiloh had taken care of our subscription to the Strib, and in his absence, I’d let it lapse.

The days of the newspaper boy, the kid on the bike, are largely over. The circulation driver was perhaps 30, with a pinched, makeupless face and short, flyaway hair. Her Toyota Starlet idled by the curb. The look she gave me as I approached was wary; she thought I was looking for a free paper before she closed the rack.

“Go ahead,” I told her. “I’ll buy one after you’re finished.”

The woman set up the display copy in the window and let the door close with a slam. I stepped into the place she’d been, fishing for a pair of quarters.

“Is that a kid, at this hour?” she asked, behind me.

“Is what a kid?” I asked absently, feeding the coin slot.

“Yelling like that. You didn’t hear it?”

She must have had ears like radar. Or maybe she had kids and there was such a thing as maternal intuition.

“I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“Over there,” she said, pointing.