John Locke - Lethal People

“I charge a two-hour minimum.”

I smiled. “I thought the twenty grand might be enough.”

She smiled back. “That’ll help take away the sting,” she said, “but you said the twenty was for the beating. Anything else, such as rehearsing, that’s extra.”

She saw me frown.

“Don’t go cheap on me now, Donovan,” she said. “I’m obviously the only game in town, the only escort that matches Kathleen enough for this crazy scheme to work.”

“Fair enough,” I said, noting she’d called herself a hooker earlier. “But if I’m paying for your time I want your full attention.”

“Of course.”

I nodded. “Good. And, Lauren, I’ll make you a promise: if my ex breaks off the wedding, I’ll owe you a favor.”

“A favor,” she said.

I nodded.

“You mean like some kind of Mafi a thing?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Like what, you mean you’d kill someone if I asked you to?”

I shrugged. “It’s up to you how you use your favor.”

“Mister, you are some kind of twisted freak, anyone ever tell you that?”

“I hear that a lot, actually.”

She looked at me silently for a moment. “Well I intend to hold you to it,” she said, “cause I’ve got a Ken Chapman in my life, too.” Lauren tried to hand one of the envelopes back to me. She said, “Don’t you want to just give me half now, half later?”

“I trust you,” I said.

She nodded. “I guess if you’re willing to beat me up and kill my ex, you’re not the sort of person who gets double-crossed much, am I right?”

“You think you can pull this off convincingly?” I said.

“Are you kidding me?” She said her experience as a successful escort all these years made her a better actress than Meryl Streep.

The way she put it, “Every week, an eighty-year-old man thinks he gives me a screaming orgasm, okay? So this business with Janet’s a piece of cake.” Then she added, “Still, you need to prepare yourself for something.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s never going back to you.”

“I don’t want her back.”

“Then let me put it another way: she’s never going to forgive you.”

“You don’t think she’ll eventually thank me?”

“Not a chance.”

I thought about that a bit. “Okay,” I said. “It’s still worth it.”

In all, Lauren and I were together six hours. The first hour we rehearsed her lines, over and over. Then I ordered room service. We rehearsed another thirty minutes while waiting for the food. Lunch came and we ate it and chatted about life in general.

I couldn’t get over how much she looked like Kathleen Gray. Lauren didn’t have Kathleen’s spark, of course, or her gift of gab, or her capacity to be adorable. Yet she had something special going for her in a Kathleen sort of way.

After lunch, since I was paying for her time anyway and since she looked so much like Kathleen Gray, we had a little casual sex.

Then I beat the shit out of her.

We rehearsed her lines again while I waited for her bruises to bloom. Then I took pictures and got the information about her ex and asked if she had a preference how she wanted the hit to go down. She said, “Two things. First, I want him to suffer.”

“Of course you do.”

“Wait,” she said. “This is really going to happen, isn’t it?”

I smiled. “What’s the second thing?”

“I want to watch him die.”

I smiled again. “Of course you do.”

She asked, “Am I bad?”

I shrugged. “Hey, he’s got to die sometime, right? Now don’t over-think this. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”

CHAPTER 21

One quick glance and I forgot all about Joe DeMeo.

It was Saturday, a couple hours after my meeting with DeMeo at the cemetery. I was staying in a luxury beach hotel in Santa Monica when she knocked on the door.

Jenine.

The first thing she noticed was the envelope fat with cash on the edge of the coffee table. She picked it up and her eyes widened as she riffled through the stack of hundreds. She glanced at me to see if I was serious.

I nodded.

She’d been advertising on Aspiring Actresses, the internet escort site, and had purchased enough space to display three sultry photographs and a bio listing her vital statistics and limited acting experience.

In the e-mails we exchanged, she admitted being desperate for cash, and I had agreed to share some of mine in return for what might happen when we eventually met.

When she’d called from the lobby, I gave my room number and wondered—having been previously burned in similar encounters—if the girl who showed would bear any resemblance to the photos I’d seen.

I needn’t have worried. If anything, she looked better than advertised—and that was saying a lot. Dressed casually in jeans and a halter top and sporting iridescent ear buds tethered to a surprisingly bulky MP3 player, she looked every bit the college student for whom a distinguished professor might willingly sacrifice his career.

Jenine removed the ear buds and placed the MP3 player on the coffee table before tucking the envelope securely into her handbag. She performed the obligatory small talk in a detached but efficient manner until I let her know it was time to move things along.

Standing before me in the parlor of one of Southern California’s most exclusive boutique hotel rooms, biting her lower lip, she suddenly seemed quite small and vulnerable.

Before she arrived, I had propped open the French doors leading to the balcony. A slight breeze manipulated the sheer curtains into random patterns that caught her eye, causing her to look beyond the small wrought iron seating area. From her vantage point, the Santa Monica Pier was visible, and she smiled wistfully at it or something else that attracted her attention.

On the beach below us, a guy played riffs on a saxophone.

Someone’s stunning twenty-year-old daughter began lifting her halter top for my pleasure, and I thought about what I would do to a guy like me if this had been my daughter, Kimberly. After removing her top, she covered her breasts with her arms and paused.

I asked if there was a problem.

Just that she’d never done anything like this before, she said, and she was only doing it this once in order to make ends meet until her big break came along. I gave her the nod of understanding she expected, and she unbuttoned her jeans, slid them to the floor, and stepped out of them.

Promptly dismissing any misgivings I may have had regarding her age, I appraised her pert body and caught myself saying that what she was doing was no big deal; lots of famous actresses started out this way.

“It shows how committed you are to your craft,” I said, shamelessly.

That wistful smile played about her lips again, and she wriggled out of her panties. “What do you like?” she asked, and something in the tone of her voice suggested she had in fact done this sort of thing many times before.

Demonstrating considerable expertise and a surprising degree of enthusiasm, Jenine did her best to earn the contents of the envelope, and afterward, I told her to lie on her stomach so I could get a better look at the small tattoo on her lower back.

When I aimed my camera phone, she said, “I don’t do photos.”

“Just the tattoo,” I said.

She nodded but said she’d want to check the view screen to make sure I hadn’t included any part of her ass in the shot. “I intend to be a famous actress some day,” she said, “and I don’t want any nude photos turning up.”

I told her I didn’t see any birthmarks on her body and asked if she had any I might have missed. She gave me a strange look and told me about the dime-sized rosy patch on the right side of her head, just above her ear, which would have been impossible to see without parting her hair at that precise spot.