Stay close

8

The words “law office of Harry Sutton” were stenciled into the pebbled glass. Old-school.

When Megan gently rapped on the pebbled glass, Harry answered with a resounding “Enter!”

She reached for the knob. A few hours ago, she’d called home and told Dave that she wouldn’t be home till late. He wanted to know why. She told him not to worry and hung up. Now here she was, back in Atlantic City, in a place she had known all too well.

Megan opened the door, knowing that doing so would probably change everything. The office was still a seedy one-room operation-small-time with a lowercase s — but Harry would have it no other way.

“Hey, Harry.”

Harry was not an attractive man. His eyes had enough bags under them to take a three-week cruise. His nose was caricature bulbous. His hair was a shock of white that wouldn’t come down without the threat of gunfire. But his smile, well, it was beatific. The smile warmed her-brought her back and made her feel safe.

“It’s been too long, Cassie.”

Some called Harry a street lawyer, but that wasn’t really what Harry was. Four decades ago he had graduated Stanford Law School and started on a partnership track at the prestigious law firm of Kronberg, Reiter and Roseman. One night, some well-meaning colleagues dragged the quiet, shy attorney down to Atlantic City for gambling, girls, and general debauchery. The shy Harry dived in-and never left. He quit the big firm, stenciled his name upon this very office door, and decided to champion the city’s underdogs, who, in many ways, consisted of everyone who started out here.

Very few people you meet have a halo over their head. They aren’t beautiful or angelic or working for charities-in Harry’s case, he definitely preferred the sinners to the saints-but there was just an aura of trust and goodness about them. Harry was one of those people.

“Hello, Cassie,” Harry said.

His voice was stiff. He shifted in his chair.

“How’ve you been, Harry?”

His clear blue eyes looked at her in a funny way. This wasn’t like him, but it had been nearly two decades. People change. She started to wonder if coming here had been a mistake.

“Fine, thank you.”

“Fine, thank you?”

Harry nodded, biting down on his lip.

“What’s going on, Harry?”

His eyes suddenly brimmed with tears.

“Harry?”

“Damn,” he said.

“What?”

“I promised I’d keep it together. I’m such a wuss sometimes.”

She said nothing, waited.

“It’s just that… I thought you were dead.”

She smiled, feeling relief that, yes, he was the same overly emotional guy she remembered. “Harry…”

He waved it away. “The cops came here after you vanished with that guy.”

“I didn’t vanish with that guy.”

“You just vanished on your own?”

“Sort of.”

“Well, the cops wanted to talk to you. They still do.”

“I know,” Megan said. “That’s why I’m back. I need your help.”

When Tawny Allure first saw the smiling young couple standing near her doorway, she sighed and shook her head.

Tawny’s real name was Alice. She had used it at first, going by the stage moniker “Alice in Wonderland,” but her given name made it easier for those from her past to recognize her. Right now, with work behind her, she wore a loose, can’t-tell-implants sweatshirt. She’d traded in her stiletto heels for low-top tennis shoes. She had scrubbed off the spackle-thick makeup and thrown on a pair of celebrity-in-hiding-size sunglasses. She did not, she thought, look anything like the exotic dancer she was.

The smiling couple looked as though they’d just wandered away from a Bible study. Tawny frowned. She knew the type. Do-gooders. They wanted to give her pamphlets and save her. They would have some corny catchphrase like “lose the G-string and find Jesus,” and she would respond, “Does Jesus tip well?”

The smiling blond girl was young and pretty in a wholesome way. Her hair was tied back in a cheerleader-bouncing ponytail. She wore a turtleneck and a skirt that would normally work at the club for a school-girl fantasy number, complete with bobby socks. Who wore that in real life?

The cute guy with her had the wavy hair of a politician on a sailboat. He sported khakis, a blue button-down, and had a sweater tied around his neck.

Tawny was not in the mood. Her finger throbbed and ached. She felt weak, beaten, defeated. She wanted to get inside and feed Ralphie. Her mind was still on that cop Broome’s visit and, of course, the missing Carlton Flynn. The first time she met Carlton he wore a tight black T-shirt that read “I’m Not a Gynecologist, But I’ll Take a Look.” Talk about a big-time “Keep Away” sign. But stupid Tawny had giggled when she read it. Sad when she thought about it now. Tawny had some decent attributes, but her asshole-dar was always off when it came to men.

Sometimes-most times-Tawny felt as if bad luck walked two steps behind her, catching up every once in a while, tapping her on the shoulder, reminding her that he was there, her constant companion.

It hadn’t started that way. She had loved her job at La Creme in the beginning. It had been fun and exciting and a dance party every night. And, no, Tawny hadn’t been sexually abused as a child or any of that, thank you very much, but she did have another quality you often found in people who go into her line of work.

Tawny was, she could admit to herself, inherently lazy and easily bored.

People always talk about how the girls are damaged or lacked self-esteem, and, yeah, that was true, but the big thing was, most girls simply didn’t want to hold a real job. Who does? Think about it-what were the alternatives to what she was now doing?

Take Tawny’s sister, Beth. Since graduating high school six years ago, Beth worked data entry for the First Trenton Insurance. She sat in a smelly, airless cubicle in front of a computer screen and plugged in God-knows-what data-hour after hour, day after day, year after year, stuck in a cubicle smaller than a jail cell, until, well, what?

Shudder.

Seriously, Tawny thought, Kill me now.

Here were her options when you broke it down: One, type insurance data mindlessly in a tight, stinky cubicle… or two, dance the night away and drink champagne at a party.

Tough choice, right?

But her job at La Creme wasn’t shaping up the way she thought it would. Here, she’d heard it was better than Match. com for meeting eligible guys, but the closest thing to a real relationship she’d had was with Carlton. And what had he done? He’d broken her finger and threatened Ralphie.

Some girls did indeed find a rich guy, but for the most part, they were the pretty ones, and when she looked hard in the mirror, Tawny knew that she wasn’t. Pretty, that is. She had to pile on more and more makeup. The circles under her eyes were getting darker. She needed repair work on the boob job and even though she was only twenty-three, varicose veins were starting to make her legs look like relief maps.

The perky young blonde with the turtleneck gave Tawny a little wave. “Miss, can we talk to you for a moment?”

Tawny felt a tinge of envy for this perky blonde with the toothpaste-commercial smile. The cute guy was probably her boyfriend. He probably treated her nice, took her to the movies, held her hand at the mall. Lucky. Sure, they were Bible thumpers, but they looked happy and healthy and like they’d never known sadness in their whole lives. Tawny would bet her meager life savings that every person that these two had ever known was still alive. Their parents were still happily married and looked healthy, just like them, only a little older, and they played tennis and had barbecues and big family dinners, where the relatives bowed their heads and said a nice prayer.

Soon, they would tell her that they had all the answers to her problems, and, sorry, Tawny just wasn’t in the mood. Not today. Her broken finger ached so damn much. A cop had just threatened to throw her in jail. And her sadistic, psycho puppy of a “boyfriend” was missing and maybe, God willing, dead.

The smiling cute boy said, “We just need to talk to you for a brief moment.”

Tawny was about to tell them to buzz off, but something made her pull up. These two were different from the standard-issue Bible thumpers who stood outside the club and harassed the girls with quoted Scripture. They seemed more… Midwestern maybe? More fresh scrubbed and bright-eyed. A few years ago, Tawny’s grandmother, may she rest in peace, had really gotten in to some hokey televangelist on a crappy cable network. They had something called the Wholesome Music Hour with young teens singing gently with guitars and hand claps. That’s what these kids looked like. Like they just escaped from some cable-TV church choir.

“It won’t take long,” the perky blonde assured her.

Here they were, on her doorstep, today of all days. Not at the club’s back entrance. Not yelling out a bunch of slogans about sin. Maybe, after all the destruction, with her finger aching and her feet hurting and the rest of her feeling too bone tired to take one more step, these two kids were here for a reason. Maybe they had indeed been sent, in Tawny’s hour of darkest need, to rescue her. Like two angels from above.

Could that be?

A stray tear ran down Tawny’s cheek. The perky blond girl nodded at her as though she understood exactly what Tawny was going through.

Maybe, Tawny thought, readying her key, I do need saving. Maybe these two kids, unlikely as it sounded, were her ticket to a better life.

“Okay,” Tawny said, choking back a sob. “You can come in. Just for a second, okay?”

They both nodded.

Tawny opened the door. Ralphie sprinted across the room toward them, his nails clacking on the linoleum. Tawny felt her heart soar at the sound. Ralphie-the one good, kind, loving thing in her life. She bent down and let Ralphie run her over. She giggled through a sob and scratched Ralphie in that spot behind his ears for a few seconds and then stood back up.

Tawny turned to the perky blonde, who still had the smile in place.

“Beautiful dog,” the perky blonde said.

“Thank you.”

“Can I pet him?”

“Sure.”

Tawny turned to the cute guy. He smiled at her too. But the smile was weird now. Off somehow…

The cute guy was still smiling when he cocked his fist back. He was still smiling when he turned his hips and shoulders and punched Tawny straight in the face with everything he had.

As Tawny crumbled to the floor, blood spurting out of her nose, eyes rolling back, the last sound she heard was Ralphie whimpering.