Bad Things (17 page)

The sound of the lock. The back of a tall, wide man that Xavier already knew would be Sergei when he let the camera see his face.

Everything in Ukrainian. Then those few, carefully practiced phrases. Her smile nervous, but eager. Proud of how much she’d mastered.

The man’s voice, a curt tumble of Slavic words, then English. Modeling the new phrase for her to learn.

Her, skeptical but still smiling, asking him a question in her language. Probably asking what those unfamiliar English words meant.

He just repeated the phrase in English.

Her smile fading, she nervously mimicked him. “Do you like virgins?”

Carson was already crying. But he kept watching, listening as the man modeled a few more sentences, and the girl obediently repeated her lesson with a voice that kept getting weaker and was gradually breaking apart, because she was realizing, with every passing minute, that she’d made a terrible mistake. Whatever they’d told her—that she’d be a nanny, or a maid, or work at McDonald’s—wasn’t really why they’d bought her a plane ticket and given her a room in that dismal motel.

Then Carson watched the man rape her.

Xavier needed to do something about Jeff and Joey. Greedy pervs always wanted the indoor posts, because when you were stuck manning the door, you didn’t have the view of the girls sprawled and spread and posed on the tables. And since Brian had of course spread the word that Xavier preferred dick to cunt, the rest of the guys whined and cried about how the queer was cock-blocking them every time he insisted on keeping the rotation. But every shift he spent outside was a waste. All he got was a chance to memorize the faces of the clients as they arrived, and their names on the guest list. But most of those were probably fake.

Maybe a couple nights like the one with Dough Boy, and like this night with Kayleigh, and Brain would step in and put Xavier on the indoor post permanently. At first, he thought a client was getting gropey, again. There was no high, angry voice rising over the din of the men, this time. Instead, it was a gradual, spreading hush and stillness that caught his attention.

Kayleigh was lying on her back, spine arched, legs draped to the side, and Connie was painting a mural on her tits. But in awkward contrast to the graceful contortion of Kayleigh’s body, her face was red and wet and twisted. Connie looked nervous, whispering something to Kayleigh, but she kept painting, greens and blues and blacks turning Kayleigh’s breasts into a convex scene of fornication while the six men seated around the table watched, craning their necks and stretching their spines to get a good look. But a couple of them were looking more and more put out by Kayleigh’s weeping.

Brian touched Xavier’s shoulder. Not a tap. An oddly intimate touch that was almost a caress.

“
Get her the fuck out of here.” He looked as put out as if all the girls in his employ had suddenly grown cocks. “Apologize to the gentlemen. Tell them I’ll have a new girl on their table in five minutes, and get her the fuck out of here. Take her home. Stupid cunt doesn’t have a car, and I don’t want her loitering out front, ugly crying while she waits for a taxi. Wait until you’ve got her in your car, and tell her she’s fired. I’ve got to go tell Amber to get her skinny ass ready.”

One more rung up the ladder. He just had to step on one sad girl to get up there.

“What do you say, gentlemen? Shall we replace this one with a model that doesn’t leak?”

The two men who’d been squirming and looking away lightened up a bit, grinning as if that sad joke reassured them that it was the girl who was broken, and not them.

“I don’t mind if the next one’s wet, too, as long as she’s leaking from the other end,” another guy said, then laughed at his own joke for a minute straight.

“
The lovely Amber will join you gentlemen in just a few minutes,” Xavier said, though he was trying to read Connie, who was cleaning her brushes, deliberately avoiding looking at him or anyone else.

“
Nighty night, sweetheart. Pleasant dreams,” the guy next to the comedian said in a voice more sadistic than any Xavier had managed to conjure in even his darkest encounters with Dario.

When Xavier touched her arm, Kayleigh sat up and slid to the edge of the table. He didn’t love leaving Connie there alone with that pack of hyenas, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, so he just said, “Enjoy the rest of your evening, gentlemen,” then led Kayleigh toward the dressing room.

“Brian asked me to take you home. Get dressed, and get your things, okay?”

She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, with the distinct look of someone who’d escaped the school bully, only to end up in the office of the principal who had a reputation for pedophilia. Apparently Brian hadn’t spread the news of Xavier’s preferences beyond Carson and the circle of security guys.

“You’re safe as houses with me, darling,” he whispered to her. “Unless you’ve been tucking a big cock between your legs.”

She still didn’t meet his eyes, but even with tears streaking her cheeks, he caught a twitch of a grin.

He waited for her just outside the dressing room door, then escorted her out of the club, and to his car. Since she was only carrying a biggish purse, he figured she hadn’t guessed that she was canned.

“
Where do you live?”

“
Miracle mile.”

Relieved her place was more or less on the way home, he headed toward the freeway. It was late enough, there’d be no point going back to the club, and he wouldn’t have wanted to leave Carson alone much longer, but he had time to try to milk
a little information out of her.

Maybe he shouldn’t tell her she was out of a job. Maybe Brian was one of those volatile guys who fired people when they pissed him off, then yelled at them when they didn’t show up for their next shift. Then again, letting her know she’d been cut loose was probably the quickest way to knock down the obstacle of any loyalty she might feel toward Brian and Gomorrah.

“So. They gave you the asshole table tonight, eh?”

“
Every table is the asshole table.”

“
So why don’t you quit?”

She laughed, and fresh tears rolled down her cheek. “Yeah, ’cause there’s sooooo many jobs for a high school dropout. I’ll just look through the hundreds of emails from all the headhunters who’ve been stalking me.”

“You dropped out of high school?” He loved that. People so rarely surprised him. But the girls at the club seemed more like liberal arts majors—educated, but without better prospects.

“
No way I could make money like this without letting the guys actually do that shit to me. These assholes have sick imaginations. But at least they only talk about it. At least, with me they only talk about it.”

“
Is that what upset you tonight? The things the guys were saying?”

“
Brian’s not going to fire me, is he?”

Fuck. Couldn’t she have answered his questions before asking that?

“Yes. He is. By proxy.”

She was quiet. She was still, except she was nodding her head, and tears were sliding down her cheeks and dropping into her lap.

“Do you drink, Kayleigh?”

“
Tonight? Yeah, I fucking drink.”

“
What’s your poison?”

He pulled in at the next strip mall, ducked into the inevitable liquor store—nucleus of every strip mall in L.A.—and bought a liter of Grey Goose and a jar of olives. When they got to her place, she made a pitcher of martinis. He fucking hated martinis, but he could suck it up for one night.

Her place was nice, if you could stomach that whole Pottery Barn thing. Good-sized one bedroom right off the Miracle Mile. Not just furnished. Decorated. She’d nested.

“
Sweet pad.”

She huffed, more than laughed. “Guess I shouldn’t have gotten so carried away. I’ve got seven more months on the lease. I’m fucked.”

“There are other clubs.”

“
No. There aren’t.”

“
Sheba? Odalisque? Flesh?”

“
They don’t pay. Not like Gomorrah.”

“
What does Brian pay you?”

Her eyes darted away from his gaze, and she hid behind her drink, taking tiny sips.

“What? Is it a secret?”

She shrugged. But she finished her drink, and made another batch, and by the time she’d downed martini number two, she was feeling more talkative.

“Other clubs only pay you to be pretty, and to be naked. At Gomorrah, that’s the salary we make. What goes in the check we get every two weeks. What goes on the 1040. But those checks aren’t shit. The real money is under the table.”

It always worked. Just plant the question, like a seed, then wait for it to sprout and grow. People love to talk. People love to show you they know things you don’t know. Especially after a couple drinks.

“What’s the under-the-table money for?”

“
Where do you live, Xavier?”

“
Venice.”

“
I should have picked a place by the beach. When you’re from Montana, you think all of L.A. is by the beach. You don’t think you’ll live just a few miles away, and never go. I don’t think I’ve seen the ocean in more than a month.”

She looked wistful. Then sadder and sadder, minute by minute, sipping her martini, staring into her own personal void, until she looked like she was going to break.

Distracted because he couldn’t check the video feed on his phone and make sure Carson wasn’t up to anything, Xavier was having trouble focusing and deciding how to steer the conversation.

Kayleigh tried to take a sip from her empty glass, then sighed. “You should go. I’m a mess.”

“You’re not a mess.”

“
Well,” a tear slid down her cheek. “I’m about to turn into a mess. So you should go.”

“
You’re upset. It’s okay to cry. I’m not judging.” Her sadness, her hurt made a sore spot in his chest, but he carried on manipulating. “You’ll find another job. If you have to, you’ll find another place to live. Something more affordable.”

“
I just have to lie there. But Connie? I don’t know how she does it.”

“
How Connie does what?”

“
Takes dictation for those monsters.”

“
Her paintings?”

“
Those guys tonight decided the girl in their…story, or whatever, was thirteen. They kept saying it, like her being thirteen was the best part of the whole thing. More exciting than any sadistic, filthy idea they could come up with for what they’d do to her.”

“
Is that why you were upset?”

“
I don’t talk about that.” Slurred words. Her, swaying, trying again to suck the dregs of the third martini away from the olives she never ate. “That’s what they pay me for. Not the paycheck. The real money.”

“
Not anymore,” he said bluntly. Hurting her on purpose. So she’d talk.

“
You know, most of them, if you let them at a thirteen year-old girl, I think they’d really do those fucked up things they say when they’re dictating. It’s hard to go to work, thinking that way about people. It’s hard to leave your house.”