The Mammoth Book of Erotica presents The Best of Lucy Taylor (3 page)

And if Sonny Valdez was still alive, there was the chance he might just show up at the door one day and introduce Beth to the Nicholas Berringer she
didn’t
know – and probably didn’t want to.

The Mayflower Arms was one of the small, swank, boutique-hotels located in the Yorkville district, northwest of Bloor Street. As expensive as it was unsubtle, the lobby Nicholas entered was gilded like a Russian Easter egg, appointed with heavy, dark velvet furniture and Rococo lamps whose shades were supported by languidly stretching nymphs and pirouetting ballerinas. Whatever else was going on with Sonny, he wasn’t hurting for money any longer.

The artfully made-up woman behind the front desk spoke with a French accent so thick it was almost unintelligible, but the fact that she resembled a young Sophia Loren made asking her to repeat herself a pleasure.

Nicholas gave her his real name and was relieved when she rang Sonny’s suite and, evidently, was told to send Nicholas on up. Apparently, Sonny had forgotten the image of Nicholas hovering at his death bed a few years earlier, murmuring “rot in hell”.

The elevator was of the old-fashioned cage design only large enough to accommodate two people. As Nicholas ascended, he found himself imagining how it would be to fuck a woman in such close quarters and such potentially embarrassing circumstances. He thought about Elise, who had come into his life and shattered it and disappeared into the night again like some kind of succubus and about what he’d like to do to her if she were here. Decided the only thing more satisfying than fucking her would be strangling her at the same time.

“What’s this?” Elise had said, looking at the money Nicholas put on the dressing table as though she’d never seen currency before. “I told you, I’m not a hooker.”

“Take it,” he said. “I’d feel better.”

“I hate taking something from somebody when I don’t give nothing back,” she’d said. An odd comment, he’d thought, coming from a woman he’d just spent the last few hours boinking.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, you gave me plenty.”

She cocked her head, pursed her cupie-doll mouth, pinned him to the wall with her blank blue stare. “Well, you know, you may be right, Nicky. Maybe I did.”

The elevator groaned open. He didn’t need to look for Sonny’s door. It was already open, the view within obscured by the portly drug-dealer’s squat bulk. He wore white sweat pants, a white sweat shirt and running shoes – an outfit which, considering the fact that he must weigh close to two hundred and fifty pounds now, gave him the air of a thuggish gnome. A highball glass, clinking with ice cubes, was in one hand.

“Nicky-boy, long time, no see.” Despite the distinctly unwelcoming tone, he extended a spade-shaped hand. “To what do I owe the honor of this impromptu social call?”

“I heard you were still alive, and I wanted to see for myself.”

“Then this
is
a social call?”

“Not exactly. You gonna let me in?”

Sonny’s face split into two portions, the grinning mouth below, the eyes, fraught with hate and cunning, above. Guardedly, like someone relishing a private joke, he motioned Nicholas in.

They sat opposite each other, in fat-cushioned chairs with an absurdly fragile-looking glass-topped coffee table between them, hunched over like men closing a questionable deal. Sonny drank gin. Nicholas had a Scotch, which he intended to nurse, but ended up swigging down like soda in an effort to make this encounter less unbearable.

For his part, Sonny chugged his drink like a man facing a firing squad the next morning. He filled his glass again, leaned back, stroked his scruffy beard. “You look good, Nicky-boy. You look – respectable, prosperous. You must be proud of yourself. From a hot-looking young street kid to drug-dealer to hard-timer to – look at you now, what are you, thirty-five? – a well-dressed businessman, probably married to some sweet woman who has no idea about your past. You
are
married, am I right? Her name’s Beth, I believe.”

“How the hell do you know about her?”

“Oh, I got ways. That fuck-up Danny Sorenson, he needed a job, so I hired him to do a little PI work. He says you made a good life for yourself there in Detroit. You got a lot to be proud of, Nicky-boy. Not many men could make the transition you did. If the streets don’t eat them alive, prison does. Hell, I remember when you –”

“I didn’t come here to reminisce,” said Nicholas. “I came because I want to know why you aren’t dead. I want to know what happened, the name of your doctors, what drugs you took, the clinic you went to, if it was one of those places in Mexico that deals in holistic stuff or something experimental or –”

“Hey, hold on, just hold the fuck on,” said Sonny. “What are you talking about? Who says I went anywhere or did anything to get cured? Who says I was even sick?”

“I
saw
you, Sonny, remember? I stood by your bedside. You were down to skin and bones. You smelled like a morgue. Plus you were destitute. You didn’t have shit, let alone the big bucks to pay for some fancy cure. So don’t bullshit me. I want to know why you didn’t die, what drugs you took, where you went to get well.”

“Who says I took anything? Who says it weren’t the grace of God? A miracle?”

“Bullshit.”

“What is this, Nicky-boy, you thinkin’ about med school? Trying to get published in some medical journal? If
Sixty
fucking
Minutes
shows up wantin’ an interview, maybe I’ll have somethin’ to say, but why the fuck should I talk to you?”

“Because you’ve got to,” Nicholas said. “Because I’m dying.”

So he told Sonny about the night with Elise and the blood test a couple of months later, just being on the safe side, and how the test showed that his white count was decimated, that he was about two T-cells away from full-blown fucking AIDS.

When he finished, there was a beat of silence, like stopped time, while the words hung in the air between them. Then Sonny gave a deep, satisfied sigh, like a man who’s just put away a prime cut of filet mignon, and said, “Will you excuse me a minute, Nicky-boy? What you just said, this shocks me a little bit. I need to take it in.”

Maybe it was the Scotch that dulled Nicholas’s thinking, but he figured Sonny was only going to take a piss or get another drink. Only when Sonny eased himself back into his seat did he recognize the dramatic change in the man’s demeanor, the dreamy slackness of his features, for what it was.

“Fuck, what did you
do
?” He grabbed Sonny’s wrist and yanked up the sleeve of the sweatshirt – track marks, some old, some very recent.

“China white,” said Sonny, answering the unspoken question. “Pure as twelve-year-old pussy.”

Nicholas recoiled. “You always said only assholes use their own product.”

“Helps me relax,” said Sonny. “Some primo smack and a coupl’a whores and it’s almost like I’m back the way I was before.”

“Before
what
?”

“What you came here to find out about – the secret to my great good health, the miracle cure.”

Nicholas realized he had only minutes before Sonny nodded off into that floaty, pink-lined dream state between sleep and wakefulness. Heroin limbo.

“So
talk
. Sonny.”

“You say you’re dying. That’s too bad, Nicky-boy, but you tell me, why the fuck should I give a shit?”

Nicholas had prepared for this. Calmly he pulled the 0.9 mm Biretta out of his jacket and aimed it at Sonny’s head. “Because if you don’t tell me what I want to know, I kill you. Right here, right now. I got nothing to lose, Sonny. I got AIDS, so I’m dead anyway. Taking you with me will just be a bonus.”

Sonny grinned at the gun like it was somebody’s index finger and let loose a laugh. “You can’t kill me, Nicky-boy. Wanna know why? ’Cause there ain’t no me to kill. There is no me. I never was. I never will be. It was all a dream, a fucking fabrication.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Sonny moved as if to stand up. Nicholas cocked the gun, said in a whisper that was sibilant with menace, “Sit the fuck down.”

“I need a drink.”

“You don’t need nothing, Sonny.”

“Say that again.”

“What?”

“What you called me. I like to hear it. Say it again.”

He’s trying to con me into thinking he’s crazy
, Nicholas thought,
into putting the gun away. Either that, or he’s drugged himself out of his mind
. But he answered anyway. “I called you Sonny. That’s your name, isn’t it? Sonny Valdez? Scumbag
par excellence
. A consummate shit. How’s that?”

“Sonny Valdez, Sonny Valdez.” He shut his eyes, swayed slightly and chanted the words like a schoolyard ditty. So enraged was Nicholas by what he assumed had to be a performance that he shifted the gun to his left hand and backhanded Sonny a stunning blow to the side of the head.

Sonny keeled sideways. But for the heft of the chair arm, he would have collapsed to the floor. Instead, he sagged limply for a second, then righted himself with a slow-motion deliberateness that, under other circumstances, Nicholas would have found unspeakably satisfying.

“How’d you get well, Sonny? Just give me the name of your doctor or your guru or your medicine man and I’ll be on my way. You can OD in peace. I don’t give a fuck.”

Sonny’s eyelids fluttered open. He grinned and shook his head like he was trying to dislodge a gnat from his ear. His eyes gleamed with dark joy and a perverse, soulless pleasure.

“So you stuck your dick in the wrong hole, huh, Nicky-boy? So did I, only that’s not what gave me the cancer. That’s what took the cancer away. Took everything away.”

“What?”

“I’m talking about a piece of ass. A fucking piece of pussy.”

“A woman?”

“You deserve her, Nicky-boy, and everything she’ll do to you. One thing, though – I tell you who she is, you find her, I want you to come back to me and tell me where
she is
.”

“Why’s that, Sonny?”

But the drug-dealer’s eyes were easing shut. He sighed and snored and then jerked semi-awake, a tic twitching at the corner of one eye.

Nicholas shook him so hard his head bounced back and forth like a dashboard dog’s. “
Why
, Sonny?”

“ ’Cause I got unfinished business with the bitch,” he whispered slowly. “She stole from me, the fucking cunt. I’m gonna kill her, ’cause she stole my fucking name.”

“Fucking crazy smack-shooting, son-of-a-bitch,” muttered Nicholas as he left the hotel.

The rain had started again, warm and stinging, driven in spurts by the wind. Nicholas walked with his head down, avoiding the puddles, trying to think.

The Biretta was back in jacket, unfired. His brain was brimming with booze and the Volvo must’ve been stolen, because he could swear there was some other vehicle in the space where he’d parked it.

At first he thought of going back to his hotel and trying to sleep, then saying screw it, driving back home to Detroit, explaining the whole nasty business to Beth and facing the consequences. At least, he knew that
she
was healthy. Her system couldn’t take the Pill so, for years now, they’d been using condoms for birth control.

He couldn’t face her, though. Not yet.

Not while Sonny Valdez, for all his demented ravings, had given him a shred of hope.

So he called Beth and made his excuses. Then, for the next week, he stayed in Toronto, taking in the live sex shows, the backroom peepshows, investigating the upscale callgirl services, the street hustlers and whores. He didn’t have sex, paid or otherwise: which was remarkable for Nicholas, since these streets were his old stomping grounds. They reeked of all his old addictions – bought sex and booze and the oblivion brought on by a trio of hot whores, a few grams of coke, and enough Jack to numb out everything but reptile brain lust.
Names
, he thought, remembering Sonny’s babbling,
who even wanted a name then? Who needed to know
?

“Myriam, her name’s Myriam,” he said to the stringy-haired hustler who sidled up to him outside the strip bar where he’d just spent the last hour trying to get information out of girls so stoned or high or just braindead that they made talking to Sonny seem intellectually stimulating.

To Nicholas’s surprise, the boy’s sallow face lit up; the somber blankness of his eyes gleamed with animation and a hint of fear.

“Myriam?”

“You know where to find her?”

“No, but if you make it worth my while, I know somebody who might. My lover. She saved his life.”

No marquee advertised her. No promoter delivered his pitch or handed out fliers outside a dark doorway. There was only a stairway leading down to a basement underneath a boarded-up adult bookstore. When Nicholas took out his wallet, the smokey-skinned East Indian manning the door shook his head. “No more audience tonight. Full up.”

Sonny had told him this might happen, so he took a chance. “I’m a friend of Sonny Valdez. He knows Myriam.”

The man shrugged. “Don’t know no Valdez.”

“Fuck it, man, I’m sick. I know what it is that she does. Sonny told me all about her.”

The man nodded knowingly. “Maybe you come in anyway,” he said, unblocking the door.

The stage was small and furnished only with a mattress covered in yellow satin sheets and a leather swing of the type sold in sex boutiques. Crimson curtains were gathered back on either side. White carpeting and stark white walls, against which the curtains stood out like stigmata.

The audience sat on a semi-circle of tiers facing the stage. Saffron-tinted track lighting rendered their faces bleak, surreal, and jaundiced-looking. Some of the patrons, almost all men, had removed their shoes and sat cross-legged, like yogis, but any resemblance to an ashram ended there. The room reeked of sex. Half a dozen nude and semi-nude women slunk on their hands and knees along the tiers, offering their mouths to the seated men, a few of whom unzipped in the detached, dispassionate way of bored despots exercising
droits de seigneurs
.

Nicholas aimed himself at a seat at the end of the tier farthest away from the stage. He tottered a bit getting up there and plopped down with an unintended grunt, like an old man losing a grip on his walker. Fuck, not only had he let Sonny Valdez send him on this wild goose chase, but he was shit-faced as well. He thought about getting the hell out of there, finding his way back to the hotel, assuming he still could, and decorating those snazzy gold bathroom fixtures and cushy white towels with part of Sonny’s frontal lobe, then he looked down and saw the brunette with her round tawny rump in the air and decided maybe that would be hasty.