Money Shot

8.

I didn’t exactly wake up. It was more like I fought my way up through a twilight sea of gauzy pain and confusion for what felt like centuries until I finally focused on Malloy’s profile and the glowing tip of his cigarette.

“You’re awake,” he said. Not a question, just a statement.

“If you want to call it that,” I replied. My throat hurt. Come to think of it, everything hurt.

I looked around and saw that I was in a small lounge that could have been the chic waiting room for a celebrity plastic surgeon. Malloy pushed an oversized white mug of coffee across the table till it was close enough for me to reach.

“You wanna go first,” he asked. “Or should I?”

I looked down at the coffee and then back at Malloy. He must have been up all night but didn’t look it. He looked the same as ever, unchanging as a stone idol, except he had on a different cheap suit jacket, dark gray instead of dark green. I’d probably bled on him at some point the night before.

I picked up the coffee with my left hand. It smelled wonderful, but my stomach wasn’t too sure about the prospect. I took a sip anyway. I needed it.

I was mildly surprised by the fact that the coffee was exactly the way I like it. Black with one Sweet’N Low. Funny, since I didn’t recall ever telling Malloy how I take my coffee.

“You go first,” I finally managed to say. My throat hurt worse than the day I shot Sword Swallowers 14 with Axl Rodd and Dix Steele. My voice sounded thick and gritty, like somebody else.

“Uniform patrol found Sam Hammer’s body in your abandoned car over by the Van Nuys airport,” Malloy said, stubbing his cigarette in a smooth stone ashtray. “One in the knee and two to the back of the head. Tortured and then executed. Stone cold. They’re considering the possibility of a male accomplice but it sounds as if they like you for the shooter.”

I didn’t do a spit take with the coffee, but I came close. The idea that Sam was dead was bad enough but the fact that the cops thought I’d done it was even more unreal.

“Why me?” I asked, forcing the words through numb lips. “Why would they...”

“You own a Sig P232?”

I felt a sick, spiraling feeling of hopelessness and despair gathering under my solar plexus. Now I knew why a big butch bastard like that fucking rhino would use such a girly gun. Because it was a girl’s gun. Mine.

“Fuck,” I said softly.

I remembered that bland-faced motherfucker telling me he had my house and office searched, looking for his goddamn money. Whoever did the search—maybe that weasely Eastern Bloc guy—must have stolen my gun from my nightstand drawer and brought it to the house in Bel Air. I was starting to grasp just how meticulously and thoroughly I had been fucked.

“They found your Sig in a dumpster around the corner from the abandoned vehicle,” Malloy said. “A coupla young hard-ons from the Valley division questioned me just before you called. Thought maybe I might be the male accomplice.” He shook his head. “I’m ironclad. I was out propping up an old buddy in the department, a detective sergeant going through a nasty divorce.”

“I...” I tried to swallow, but my throat felt squeezed down to nothing. “I didn’t kill Sam, I swear. You don’t believe this bullshit, do you? If I was going to kill Sam, you think I’d be stupid enough to shoot him with my own legally registered gun and then just leave his body sitting in my fucking car?”

Malloy looked at me with his narrow alligator eyes, wordlessly sizing me up. An endless minute passed. He pulled another cigarette from a crumpled pack, then offered the pack to me. I shook my head. He shrugged and put the pack away, then stuck the cigarette between his lips.

“No,” he finally said, shaking his head as he lit up with a battered Zippo. “I don’t buy it. Smells like setup city, but it’s not just that.” He snapped the lighter shut. “I could maybe buy you getting all pissed off and blowing some guy away in the heat of the moment. But the truth is, you just don’t strike me as the type who’d torture a good friend and then finish him with a cold-blooded, professional execution. No offense, but I just don’t think you’ve got it in you for that kind of action. You want to tell me what really happened?”

Malloy was completely still and silent as I filled him in. His cigarette burned unsmoked between two thick fingers. It was disconcerting. You don’t realize how much you depend on a listener to spur your story on with little nods and noises and various cues to continue like “Really?” or “No shit.” However, I did get the feeling that I was being listened to more intently than ever before. Like I was feeding information into a machine for processing. I told him everything, starting from the blonde with the briefcase and ending with him showing up to scrape my ass off the sidewalk.

When I was done, I sipped more coffee, just to have something to do with my shaking hands. He took a deep drag off the cigarette and then flicked the long ash into the stone ashtray.

“You want my help,” he said. Again a statement, not a question.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I want you to help me find the fuckers who did this to me. I can pay you.”

He shook his head.

“Your bank accounts’ll be frozen by now.”

“I have money,” I said. “Cash. In my line of business, it never hurts to have a safety net.”

He arched a silver brow and then killed the cigarette.

“Keep it,” he replied. “You’re gonna need it.”

“Does that mean you won’t help me?” I asked.

He shrugged. There was a long moment of awkward silence. I’d done all the begging I was going to do the night before, so I just kept my mouth shut and waited for his answer.

“I’ll do what I can,” he said eventually.

I wanted to hug him, but my ribs hurt and he didn’t seem like the hugging type.

“Thanks,” I said instead.

“Right,” he said. “I guess I’d better get on the road.” He looked at his ugly watch. “If I leave now, I should be able to make Vegas by noon.”

I frowned and it hurt the bruised skin above my eyes.

“What do you mean I?” I asked. “It’s we. You can’t leave me here. Wherever you’re going, I’m going with you.”

“No,” he said with a terse shake of his head. “You’re gonna stay here where it’s safe.”

“I’m not some helpless princess, you know,” I said. “I can take care of myself.”

He looked up at me and the ghost of a smirk haunted one corner of his thin lips.

“I can see that,” he replied.

“Fuck you!” I spat, but my mad face wouldn’t stay on. I snorted through my swollen nose. “You should see the other guy.”

His tiny smirk swelled into an expression that could almost be mistaken for a smile.

“All right, boss,” he said. “I guess we better get you something to wear.”

The room Malloy ushered me into had a gold sign on the door.

“Sissy Boudoir,” I read out loud. “I think I did a girl/girl scene with her back in ’94.”

Again, that little twitch of a smile, quick as an insect wing at the corner of Malloy’s mouth, as he chivalrously held the door open for me.

The “Sissy Boudoir” was dimly lit and tricked out with pink satin and red velvet. No angles. Everything was soft and rounded in a way that made it feel sort of like being inside a huge plush vagina. To the left was a walk-in closet filled with extra-large feminine attire. Boat-sized pumps with ten-inch heels. Trampy stripper dresses and frilly French maid costumes that would have fit Malloy. Full-figured bras, enormous lace panties and boxes of queen-sized pantyhose. I was about to make some kind of snide comment when I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the full-length mirror.

I wasn’t ready for that, but I don’t know how you could be. When my eyes first snagged on the pale figure in the hospital gown, I was startled because I thought it was someone else. When I realized it was me, I felt dizzy, stricken with a kind of horrified disbelief.

“Jesus,” I whispered, pressing a palm to the cool surface of the mirror.

My face was a lurid Halloween mask, haphazardly painted in every shade of bruise. My proud Italian nose was massively swollen and lumpy under a stripe of clean white tape. Both my eyes were black, the right more than the left, making me look like an asymmetrical purple panda. My lower lip was twice the size of the upper and had a thick, crusty split down the middle. My forehead was studded with contusions, giving me a heavy, Neanderthal brow. There was blood crusted in my hair.

My arms and legs were also covered with bruises and scrapes and I could see the bristly blue stitches protruding like bug legs from my right side just under the armpit. But my gaze kept returning to that face that couldn’t possibly be my face. I suddenly understood why Savannah had shot herself after she’d bashed up her face in that car accident. Not sixteen hours ago, I had been staring into a mirror and fretting about crow’s feet and less than perfectly perky breasts. I had to laugh or I’d start screaming.

“Sure, it’s ugly today,” Malloy said, pulling a dress off its hanger and handing it to me. “But it’ll be better in a week and back to normal in two. You might want to get some work on that nose when this is all over.”

I couldn’t even imagine what “all over” really meant. What my life would be like when and if this was all over. Or what it was going to take to make it that way.

Instead of dwelling on the uncertain future, I forced myself to concentrate on the little tasks in front of me right now. Tasks like shedding the hospital gown and slipping into the dress while Malloy graciously looked away, as if the whole world hadn’t already seen me naked a million times. The dress was the smallest of the lot but still fit me like a laundry bag. It was black and probably would have looked much sluttier if it actually fit. There were no bras in anything close to my size and the dress’ deep sweetheart neckline hung droopy and unflattering on my bruised chest. Malloy had to help me zip the thing and when I looked back in the mirror I suddenly felt like crying. I wanted desperately to go home, take a shower in my safe green bathroom, and change into my own comfortable clothes. I wanted a bra that looked nice. My favorite boots. I wanted to open my neatly organized, sweet-smelling underwear drawer and pick out a nice clean cotton thong. The thought of my little house and all my books and clothes and personal things barricaded behind yellow tape and rifled by smirking cops fed my helpless anger and heated my tears to near boiling as I fought to hold them back. I turned away from the mirror and that horrible ugly face and started randomly flinging shoes around, searching for anything that was less than three sizes too big.

“I can’t,” I said. “These are all fucking huge.” I picked up a pair of cherry-red patent leather pumps. “Eleven!” I shouted, tossing them aside. “Thirteen!” I read off the print on a pair of clear plastic platforms. “Fuck!”

I flailed out with my left arm and knocked over a wire shoe rack. Huddled and shaking in a pile of trashy drag shoes, I couldn’t fight the tears anymore.

Who did I think I was kidding? I wasn’t some kind of badass action movie heroine. I was just a beat-up barefoot dead girl with no house and no business and no chance in hell of doing anything but getting my dumb ass killed for real. I might as well just turn myself in. At least in jail, I’d get shoes that fit.

Malloy turned politely away from my tears just like he had looked away while I was changing. He stood like that for a minute, giving me space to have my girly breakdown, then spoke.

“Tell you what,” he said softly. “I’ll carry you barefoot to my car and then we can swing by Payless or something. You’re a seven, right?”

“Right,” I said, snuffling back tearsnot and pushing my hair back from my face. “Seven.”

It’s funny, but that was exactly what I needed to break me out of my little pity-party. I normally hated that Men-Are-From-Mars, testosterone-driven impulse boys get where they want to solve all my problems by troubleshooting me like buggy software and offering up a simple concrete solution to stop my tears. But if Malloy had done something more intuitive and nurturing like hugging me or telling me everything was going to be all right, I would have disintegrated into a useless puddle. His simple answer to the problem of the big shoes gave me something to hold on to. Payless. Right. Good idea. It allowed me to pretend that the lack of shoes that fit really was the reason I was crying.