The Power of the Dog

Chapter Three
California Girls

La Jolla, California, 1981

Nora Hayden’s fourteen the first time one of her dad’s friends hits on her.

He’s driving her home from baby-sitting his boy brat and all of a sudden he takes her hand and sets it on his bulge. She’s going to take it off except she’s fascinated by the look on his face.

And how it makes her feel.

Powerful.

So she keeps her hand there. Doesn’t move it around or anything, but it seems to be enough and she can hear his rough breathing and see his eyes get all intense and funny and she wants to laugh except she doesn’t want to, you know, break the spell.

Next time he does it he keeps his own hand on top of hers and moves it around in circles. She can feel him grow under her palm. Feels him twitch. His face looks ridiculous.

Time after that he pulls the car over and asks her to take it out.

And she, like, hates this guy, right?

He utterly grosses her out, but she does it the way he shows her, but it feels like she’s the boss, not him. Like she can jerk him and jerk him, just by stopping and then starting again.

“It’s not a penis,” she’ll tell her friend Elizabeth. “It’s a leash.”

“No, it’s the whole puppy,”Elizabeth says. “You pet it, stroke it, kiss it, give it a warm place to sleep and it’ll go fetch things for you.”

She’s fourteen and looks seventeen. Her mom sees it, but what can she do? Nora’s splitting time between her mom’s and her dad’s and never has the term joint custody had quite such piquant meaning. Because every time she goes to her dad’s place, that what he’s doing-a joint.

Dad’s like some sort of white Rastafarian without the dreadlocks or the religious convictions. Dad couldn’t findEthiopia on a map ofEthiopia; he just likes his herb. That part of it, he totally gets.

Mom’s over all that, and it’s the big reason they divorced. She outgrew her hippie phase with a vengeance, like hippie to yuppie, zero to sixty in five seconds flat. He’s stuck in the Birkenstocks like they’re clamped onto his feet, but she’s moving on.

In fact, she gets a real good job in Atlanta and wants Nora to go with her, but Nora is like, Nah, unless you can show me where the beach is in Atlanta I’m not going. Eventually it comes down to a judge asking Nora which parent she’d like to live with and she almost says, “Neither,” but what she actually says is, “My dad,” so by the time she’s fifteen she’s going to Atlanta for major holidays and one month in the summer.

Which is just bearable if, like, she has enough good weed.

The kids at school call her “Nora the Whora,” but she doesn’t care and neither, really, do they. It’s not really so much a term of contempt as it is an acknowledgment of reality. What do you say about a classmate who gets picked up from school in Porsches, Mercedeses and limos, none of which belong to her parents?

Nora is stoned one afternoon, filling out some stupid questionnaire for the guidance counselor, and under “After School Activities” she puts down “Blow Jobs.” Before she erases it, she shows the form to her friend Elizabeth and they both laugh.

And don’t be pulling that limo into the drive-thru at Mickey D's, either. Ditto Burger King, TacoBell and Jack in the Box. Nora has the face and the body to command Las Brisas, theInn at Laguna, El Adobe.

You want Nora, you provide her with good food, good wine, good dope.

Jerry the Doof always has good coke.

He wants her to go to Cabo with him.

Of course he does. He’s a forty-four-year-old coke dealer with more memories than possibilities; she’s sixteen with a body like springtime. Why shouldn’t he want to take her for a dirty weekend inMexico?

Nora’s cool with it.

She’s sixteen but not sweet.

She knows dude isn’t, like, in love with her. She sure as shit knows she isn’t in love with him. In fact, she thinks he’s more or less a doof, with his black silk jacket and his black ball cap to cover his thinning hair. His bleached jeans, his Nikes with no socks. No, Nora gets it-dude is just terrified of getting old.

No fear, dude, she thinks. Nothing to fret about.

You are old.

Jerry the Doof has only two things going for him.

But they’re two good things.

Money and coke.

The same thing, really. Because, Nora knows, if you have money, you have coke. And if you have coke, you have money.

She sucks him off.

It takes longer because of the coke, but she doesn’t mind, she’s got nothing better to do. And melting Jerry’s popsicle is better than having to talk to him, or worse, listen to him. She doesn’t want to hear any more about his ex-wives, his kids-shit, she knows two of his kids better than he does; she goes to school with them-or how he hit that game-winning triple in his league softball game.

When she’s finished he asks, “So, you want to go?”

“Go where?”

“Cabo.”

“Okay.”

“So when do you want to go?” Jerry the Doof asks.

She shrugs. “Whenever.”

She’s about out of the car when Jerry hands her a Baggie full of fine herb.

“Hey,” her dad says when she comes in. He’s stretched out on the couch watching a rerun of Eight Is Enough. “How was your day?”

“Fine.” She tosses the Baggie onto the coffee table. “Jerry sent this for you.”

“For me? Cool.”

So cool he actually sits up. All of a sudden he’s like Mr. Initiative, rolling himself a nice tight joint.

Nora goes into her room and closes the door.

Wonders what to think about a father who’ll pimp his own daughter for dope.

Nora has a life-changing experience in Cabo.

She meets Haley.

Nora’s lying by the pool next to Jerry the Doofus, and this chick on a chaise across the pool is clearly checking her out.

A very-cool-lady type of chick.

Late twenties, dark brown hair cut short under a black sun visor. Small, thin body cut in the gym, shown off under a next-to-nothing black two-piece. Nice jewelry-spare, gold, expensive. Every time Nora glances up, this chick is looking at her.

With this know-it-all smile, just shy of a smirk.

And she’s always there.

Nora looks up from her chaise-she’s there. Walking on the beach-she’s there.

Having dinner in the hotel dining room-she’s there. Nora shies from the eye contact; it’s always Nora who looks away first. Finally she can’t handle it anymore. She waits for Jerry to lapse into one of his postcoital siestas and goes out to the pool and sits on the chaise next to the woman and says, “You’ve been checking me out.”

“I have.”

“I’m not interested.”

The woman laughs. “You don’t even know what it is that you’re not interested in.”

“I’m not a lesbian,” Nora says.

Like, she’s not into guys, but she’s not into chicks, either. Which leaves cats and dogs, but she’s not that crazy about cats.

“Neither am I,” the woman says.

“So?”

“Let me ask you this,” the woman says. “Are you making any money?”

“Huh?”

“Being a coke bunny,” the woman says. “Are you making any money?”

“No.”

The woman shakes her head, says, “Kiddo, with your face and body, you could be an earner.”

An earner. Nora likes the sound of that.

“How?” she asks.

The woman reaches into her bag and hands Nora a business card.

Haley Saxon-with aSan Diego phone number.

“What are you in, like, sales?” Nora asks.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Huh?”

“ 'Huh?’ ” Haley mocks. “See, that’s what I mean. If you want to be an earner, you have to stop saying things like 'huh.’ ”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to be an earner.”

“In which case, have a nice weekend,” Haley says. She picks her magazine back up and goes back to reading. But Nora doesn’t go anywhere, just sits there feeling stupid. It’s like five full minutes before she finds the nerve to say, “Okay, maybe I want to be an earner.”

“Okay.”

“So what do you sell?”

“You. I sell you.”

Nora starts to say “Huh,” then checks herself and says, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

Haley smiles. Lays an elegant hand on top of Nora’s hand and says, “It’s as simple as it sounds. I sell women to men. For money.”

Nora’s quick on the uptake. “So this is about sex,” she says.

“Kiddo,” Haley says, “everything is about sex.”

Haley gives her a whole speech, but basically it boils down to this: The whole world is-all the time-looking to get off.

She wraps up the spiel by saying, “You want to give it away, or sell it cheap, that’s your business. If you want to sell it for big bucks, that’s my business. How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen,” Nora says.

“Jesus,” Haley says. She shakes her head.

“What?”

Haley sighs. “The potential.”

First the voice.

“If you want to keep doing backseat blow jobs for trinkets you can talk like a beach girl,” Haley tells her a couple of weeks after they meet in Cabo. “If you want to move up in the world…”

Haley puts Nora to work with some alcoholic refugee from the Royal Shakespeare Company who drops Nora’s voice about an octave. (“That’s important,” Haley says. “A deep voice makes a dick sit up and listen.”) The dipso tutor rounds out Nora’s vowels, punches up her consonants. Makes her do monologues: Portia, Rosalind, Viola, Paulina

…

“What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?

What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?”

So her voice becomes cultured. Deeper, fuller, lower. It’s all part of the package. Like the clothes Haley takes her shopping for. The books Haley makes her read. The daily newspaper. “And not the fashion page, kiddo, or the arts,” Haley says. “A courtesan reads the sports section first, then the financial pages, then maybe the news.”

So she starts showing up at school with the morning paper. Her friends are out in the parking lot having that last-minute bong hit before the bell rings, and Nora’s sitting there checking out the scores, the Dow Jones, the editorial page. She’s reading the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, the freaking Christian Science Monitor.

And that’s about the only time she spends in the backseat.

Nora the Whora goes to Cabo and comes back Nora the Ice Maiden.

“She’s a virgin again,” is how Elizabeth explains it to their bewildered friends. She doesn’t mean it unkindly; it just seems to be true. “She went to Cabo and had her hymen reattached.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” their friend Raven says.

Elizabeth just sighs.

Raven asks her for the name of the doctor.

Nora becomes a gym fiend, spending hours on the stationary cycle, more hours on the treadmill. Haley hires her a personal trainer, a fascist health-freak chick named Sherry whom Nora dubs her “physical terrorist.” This nazi has a body like a greyhound, and she starts whipping Nora’s body into the tight little package that Haley wants to market. Gets her doing push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, and starts her on weights.

The interesting thing is that Nora starts to dig it.

All of it-the rigorous mental and physical training. Nora is, like, into it. She gets up one morning and goes to wash her face (with the special cleanser Haley buys her), looks in the mirror, and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?” She goes to class, she hears herself discoursing about current affairs and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?”

Whoever she is, Nora likes her.

Her dad doesn’t notice the change. How could he? Nora thinks. I don’t come in a Baggie.

Haley takes her on a drive up to the Sunset Strip in L.A. to show her the crack whores. Crack cocaine has hit the country like a virus, and the whores have caught it. Big time. They’re on their knees in alleys, on their backs in cars. Some of them are young, some old-Nora is shocked that they all look so old. And so sick.

“I could never be one of these women,” Nora says.

“Yes, you could,” Haley says. “If you don’t stay straight. Keep off dope, don’t let your head get fucked-up. Most of all, put the money away. You’ll have ten to twelve peak earning years, if you take care of yourself. Tops. After that, it’s all downhill. So you want to have stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Real estate. I’ll hook you up with my financial planner.”

Because the girl is going to need one, Haley thinks.

Nora is the package.

When she turns eighteen, she’s ready to go to the White House.

White walls, white carpet, white furniture. A pain in the ass to clean and maintain, but worth it because it quiets the men the moment they walk in. (There’s not one of them who wasn’t as a boy scared shitless of spilling something on his mother’s white whatever.) And when Haley is in attendance, she always wears white: The house is me, I am the house. I’m untouchable, my house is likewise untouchable.

Her women always wear black.

Nothing else, always stark black.

Haley wants her women to stand out.

And they’re always fully dressed. Never in lingerie or robes-Haley’s not running some cheap Nevada mustang ranch. She’s been known to costume the women in turtlenecks, in business suits, in basic little black frocks, in gowns. She dresses her women in clothes that the men can imagine removing. And she makes them wait to do that.

They have to jump through hoops, even at the White House.

On the walls hang black-and-white renditions of goddesses: Aphrodite, Nike, Venus, Hedy Lamarr, Sally Rand, Marilyn Monroe. Nora finds the pictures intriguing, especially the one of Monroe, because they look a little alike.

No kidding, they do, Haley thinks.

She’s billing Nora as a young Monroe without the body fat.

Nora’s nervous. She’s staring into a video monitor of the sitting room, looking at this party of clients, one of whom is going to be her first professional lay. She hasn’t had sex in a year and a half anyway, and she’s not even sure she remembers how to do it, never mind do it five hundred bucks’ worth. So she’s hoping she gets this one, the tall, dark, shy one, and it does seem that Haley is trying to steer things in that direction.

“Nervous?” Joyce asks her. Joyce is her polar opposite, a flat-chested gamine in a 1950s Paris outfit-Gigi as whore-who’s been helping with her makeup and clothes, an open-neck black blouse over a black skirt.

“Yes.”

“Everyone is the first time,” Joyce says. “Then it gets to be routine.”

Nora keeps looking at the four men sitting awkwardly on the big sofa. They look young, only in their mid-twenties, but they don’t look like rich spoiled college kids, and she wonders how they got the money to come here. How they got here at all.

Callan wonders the same thing.

Like, what the hell are we doing here?

Big Paulie Calabrese would shit blood if he knew Jimmy Peaches was out here connecting the pipeline that will suck cocaine like a giant straw from Colombia through Mexico and on to the West Side.

“Will you relax?” Peaches says. “I set a place for you at the table, will you fucking sit down and eat?”

“ 'You deal, you die,’ ” Callan reminds him. “That’s what Calabrese said.”

“Yeah, 'You deal, you die,’ ” Jimmy says. “But if we don’t deal, we starve. Is fuckin’ Paulie giving us a taste of the unions? No. The kickbacks? No. Trucking? Construction? No. Fuck him. Let him give me a taste of those businesses and then he can tell me don’t deal. In the meantime, I deal.”

The doors haven’t shut on the bellhops’ behinds and Peaches says he wants to go to this cathouse he’s heard about.

Callan’s not into it.

“We flew three thousand miles to get laid?” he asks. “We can get laid at home.”

“Not like this we can’t,” Peaches says. “They say they got the best pussy in the world at this place.”

“Sex is sex,” Callan says.

“What do you know about it?” Peaches asks. “You’re Irish.”

It’s not like Callan ain’t tempted here, it’s just that this was supposed to be a business trip, and when it comes to business Callan is just that-business. Tough enough keeping the Brothers Piccone from stepping on their own dicks on the job, never mind when they’re dogging women.

So he says, “I thought this was a business trip.”

“Jesus, will you lighten up?” Peaches says. “You’re gonna die, on your headstone it’s gonna say you never had no fun. We’ll get laid, we’ll do business. We might even take a minute to get a meal if that’s okay with you. I hear they got great seafood here.”

Yeah, this is real smart of Peaches, Callan thinks. Looking out the window at nothing but ocean, he figures someone out here might have figured out how to cook a fish.

“You’re a grim bastard, you know that?” Peaches adds.

Yeah, I’m a grim bastard, Callan thinks. I’ve punched what, five guys’ tickets for the Ciminos, Peaches tells me I’m a grim bastard.

“Who gave you the number?” Callan asks. He doesn’t like it. Peaches calls this number, some bimbo tells him, Sure, come over, they get to some warehouse where all that’s waiting for them is a shit storm.

“Sal Scachi gave me the number, all right?” Peaches says. “You know Sal.”

“I don’t know,” Callan says. If Calabrese’s gonna hit them over this drug deal, it would be Scachi who’d set it up.

“Will you relax?” Peaches says. “You’re starting to make me nervous.”

“Good.”

“ 'Good.’ He wants me to be nervous.”

“I want you to be alive.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Callan, I do.” Peaches reaches over, grabs Callan by the back of the head and kisses him on the cheek. “There, now you can go tell the priest you committed a homosexual act with a guinea. I love ya, ya mick bastard. I’m telling you, tonight’s strictly pleasure.”

Nevertheless, Callan straps on his silenced. 22 before they go out. They pull up to the White House and a minute later they’re all standing in the foyer just gawking.

Callan figures to drink a beer, then stand back and keep an eye on things. If anyone’s scheming to take Peaches off the count they’ll wait until Jimmy’s humping away and then put one in the back of his head. So Callan’s going to drink his beer, grab O-Bop and set up some kind of security. Of course, O-Bop will tell him to fuck off, he wants to get laid, so security is going to be pretty much Callan’s job. So he sips on his beer as Haley sets several black three-ring binders on the glass coffee table.

“We have a number of ladies here tonight,” she says, opening a binder. Each page has an 8x10 black-and-white glossy photograph in a plastic sleeve, with smaller, full-body poses on the reverse side. Haley’s not about to parade her women out like a livestock auction. No, this is classy, dignified, and it serves to fire the men’s imaginations.

“Knowing these ladies as I do,” she says, “I’ll be happy to assist you in making an appropriate match.”

After the other men have made their selections, she sits next to Callan, notices that he’s fixated on Nora’s head shot and whispers in his ear, “Her eyes could make you come.” Callan blushes to his toes.

“Would you like to meet her?” Haley asks.

He manages a nod.

Turns out that he would.

And he falls instantly in love.

Nora comes into the room, looks at him with those eyes. He feels a charge that goes from his heart to his groin and back again, and by the time it does he’s a goner. He’s never seen anything so beautiful in his life. The thought that something-someone-so lovely could be his even for a little while is something he didn’t think was possible in his life. Now it’s imminent.

He swallows hard.

For her part, she’s relieved it’s him.

He’s not bad-looking, and he doesn’t look mean.

She puts out her hand and smiles.

“I’m Nora.”

“Callan.”

“Do you have a first name, Callan?” she asks.

“Sean.”

“Hello, Sean.”

Haley’s beaming at them like a yenta. She wanted the shy one for Nora’s first time out, so she manipulated the others to select the more experienced women. Now everyone’s paired off into the couples she wanted, standing and chatting, getting ready to go to the rooms. She slips out back to her office so she can phone Adan and tell him his customers are having a good time.

“I’ll take care of the bill,” Adan tells her.

It’s nothing. It’s tip money compared to the business the Piccone brothers could bring him. Adan can sell a lot of cocaine in California. He has plenty of customers in San Diego and L.A. But the New York market would be enormous. To put his product onto the streets of New York through the Cimino distribution network… well, Jimmy Peaches can have all the whores he wants, on the house.

Adan doesn’t come to the White House anymore. Not as a customer, anyway. Bedding even high-class call girls doesn’t fit his persona as a serious businessman.

Besides, he’s in love.

Lucia Vivanca is the daughter of a middle-class family. Born in the USA, she’s “won the Daily Double,” as Raul puts it; that is, she has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship. Only recently graduated from Our Lady of Peace High School in San Diego, she’s living with an older sister and taking classes at San Diego State.

And she’s a beauty.

Petite, with natural blond hair against striking dark eyes, and a trim little figure that Raul obscenely comments upon at every opportunity.

“Those chupas, brother,” he says, “poking out of that blouse. You could cut yourself on them. Too bad she’s a chiflona.”

She’s not a cocktease, Adan thinks, she’s a lady. Well-bred, cultured, educated by nuns. Still, he has to admit that he’s frustrated after countless wrestling matches in the front seat of his parked car, or on the sofa of her sister’s apartment the rare times the watchful bruja gives them a few minutes alone.

Lucia will just not give it up, not until they’re married.

And I don’t have the money to get married yet, Adan thinks. Not to a lady like Lucia.

“You’d be doing her a favor,” Raul argues, “by going with a whore. Not putting all that pressure on her. In fact, you owe it to Lucia to go to the White House. Your morality is a selfish indulgence.”

Raul certainly isn’t selfish in that regard, Adan thinks. His generosity is more than abundant. My brother, Adan thinks, hits the White House the way a restaurant cook raids the pantry and eats up all the profits.

“It’s my giving nature,” Raul says. “What can I say? I’m a people person.”

“Keep your giving nature in your pants tonight,” Adan says to him now. “Tonight is about business.”

He hopes things are going well at the White House.

“Would you like a drink?” Callan asks Nora.

“A grapefruit juice?”

“That’s all?”

“I don’t drink,” Nora says.

He has no clue what to do or say, so he just stands there, staring at her.

She stares back at him, surprised. Not so much by what she feels, but by what she doesn’t feel.

Contempt.

She can’t seem to work up any contempt.

“Sean?”

“Yeah?”

“I have a room here. Would you like to go?”

He’s grateful to her for cutting through the bullshit. Keep him from standing there feeling like a jerk.

Hell yes I want to go, he thinks. I want to go up there and take off your clothes and touch you everywhere and be inside you and then I want to take you home. Take you back to the Kitchen and treat you like the Queen of the West Side and have you be the first thing I see when I get up in the morning and the last thing I see at night.

“Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

She smiles and takes his hand and they are turning to go upstairs when Peaches’ voice comes across the room.

“Yo, Callan!”

Callan turns to see him standing in the corner beside a small woman with short black hair.

“Yeah?”

“I wanna trade.”

“What?” Callan asks.

Nora says, “I don’t think-”

“Good. Keep on don’t thinking,” Peaches says. He looks at Callan. “So?”

Peaches is pissed. He spotted Nora when she came into the room. Maybe the most beautiful piece of ass he’s ever seen in his life. If he’d been shown her first, he’d have picked her.

“No,” Callan says.

“C'mon, be a sport.”

Everything in the room stops.

O-Bop and Little Peaches stop scoping the women they’re with and start checking out the situation.

Which is dangerous, is what O-Bop’s thinking.

Because while Jimmy Peaches is clearly not the craziest of the Piccone brothers-that honor goes to Little Peaches, hands down-Jimmy’s got a temper on him. It’s sudden, it comes from nowhere and you never know what Jimmy Peaches is going to do-or worse, order you to do-on the spur of the moment.

And Jimmy’s irritated right now, thinking about Callan, because Callan has gotten-what?-moody, quiet, since they got out to California. And this makes Jimmy nervous because he needs Callan. And now Callan’s about to go upstairs to fuck the woman Peaches wants to fuck and that’s just not right because Peaches is the boss here.

There’s something else, though, that makes this argument dangerous, and they all know it, although no one in Piccone’s crew is ever going to utter the words out loud: Peaches is afraid of Callan.

Flat out, there it is. They all know that Peaches is good. He’s tough, smart and mean.

He’s stone.

But Callan.

Callan is the best.

Callan is the stone-coldest killer there’s ever been.

And Jimmy Peaches needs him and is scared of him, and that’s a volatile combination. That is nitro on a bumpy road, is what that is, O-Bop thinks. He doesn’t like this shit at all. He’s busted his ass putting them together with the Ciminos, they’re all making money and now it’s all going to go to shit over some gash?

“What the fuck, guys,” O-Bop says.

“No, what the fuck?” Peaches asks.

“I said no,” Callan repeats.

Peaches knows that Callan can whip that little. 22 out and put one between his eyes before any of them can blink. But he also knows that Callan can’t gun down the whole freaking Cimino Family, which is what he’ll have to do if he kills Peaches.

So that’s what Peaches has going for him.

Which really pisses Callan off.

He’s sick of being the guineas’ attack dog.

To hell with Jimmy Peaches.

To hell with him, Johnny Boy, Sal Scachi and Paulie Calabrese. Without taking his eyes off Peaches, he asks O-Bop, “You got my back?”

“I got your back.”

So there it is.

They got a situation here.

Which don’t look like it’s gonna end happy for him or anyone else, until Nora says, “Why don’t I decide?”

Peaches smiles. “That’s fair. Is that fair, Callan?”

“It’s fair.”

Thinking that it ain’t fair. That you get so close to beauty you can’t breathe and then it slips away. But what the fuck has fair ever had to do with it?

“Go ahead,” Peaches says. “Choose.”

Callan feels like his heart’s outside of him. Out there beating away where everyone can see it.

She looks up at him and says, “You’ll like Joyce. She’s beautiful.”

Callan nods.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers.

She is, too. She wanted to go with Callan. But Haley, now back in the room and doing her best to defuse the situation, has given her the eye, and Nora’s smart enough to understand she’s supposed to choose the gross guy.

Haley’s relieved. Tonight has to go well. Adan’s made it very clear that tonight is not about her business, it’s about his. And seeing as how Tio Barrera set her up with the money to open the place, she is going to take care of the Barrera family business.

“Don’t be sorry,” Callan says to Nora.

He doesn’t go with Joyce. Tells her, “No offense, but no thanks,” and goes and stands by the car. Pulls his. 22 and holds it behind his back a few minutes later when a car pulls up and Sal Scachi gets out.

He’s dressed California casual but he’s still got them polished army shoes on. Guineas and their shoes, Callan thinks. He tells Scachi to stop right there and keep his hands where he can see them.

“Hey, it’s the shooter,” Scachi says. “Don’t worry, Shooter, Jimmy Peaches got nothing to worry about from me. What Paulie don’t know.. .”

He gives Callan a little punch under the chin and goes into the house. He’s happy as hell to be there, because he’s spent the past few months in his green suit working on some CIA op called Cerberus. Scachi with a crew of other Forces guys putting up three radio towers in the fucking Colombian jungle, then keeping an eye on them to make sure the Communist guerrillas don’t knock them down.

Now he has to make sure Peaches gets hooked up with Adan Barrera. Which reminds him…

He turns around and calls to Callan.

“Hey, kid! There’s a couple of Mexican guys coming,” Scachi says. “Do me a favor-don’t shoot them.”

He laughs and goes into the house.

Callan looks up again at the light in the window.

Peaches does her hard.

Nora tries to slow him down, soften him, show him the sweet, slow things that Haley taught her, but the man isn’t having it. He’s hard already, from his victory downstairs. He throws her facedown on the bed, yanks her skirt and panties down and shoves himself inside her.

“You feel that, huh?” he says.

She feels it.

It hurts.

He’s big and she’s not nearly wet enough and he’s pounding at her, so she definitely feels it. Feels his hands reach under her and rip her bra off and start to squeeze her breasts hard and at first she tries to talk to him, to tell him that, but then she feels the anger and contempt come over her and she’s like, Knock yourself out, asshole, so she lets her pain out in cries he mistakes for pleasure so he rams her harder and she remembers to squeeze him so he’ll come but he pulls out.

“Don’t give me any of your fucking whore’s tricks.”

He turns her over and straddles her. Pushes her breasts together, then lays his cock between them and pushes it up toward her mouth.

“Suck it.”

She does.

She does it the best he’ll let her as he pistons in and out because she wants this over. He’s doing his own porno flick anyway, so it is over soon, as he grabs his cock and pumps it and lets himself loose on her face.

She knows what he wants.

She’s seen the movies, too.

So she takes some on her finger, swirls it into her mouth and looks him in the eyes as she moans, “Mmmmmm.”

And sees him smile.

When Peaches leaves she goes into the bathroom, brushes her teeth until her gums bleed and swishes Listerine around her mouth for a full minute until she spits it out. She takes a long, almost scalding shower, then puts on a robe, goes to the window and looks out.

She sees the nice one, the shy one, leaning against the car, and wishes he could have been her boyfriend.