I spread out like a shadow on pavement under the feet of the unsuspecting woman working her corner in the seven-hundred block of South Orange Blossom Trail. Her name is Jane, and I will be wearing her by morning.
As she drags me along, I watch, listen, learn … and I think about Gaire. Although I knew something was different about him, I’d never, for a moment, expected Gaire to be a wendigo. Damn, talk about having a penchant for bad boys. That little proclivity might chalk my ’no killing humans’ rule up to multiple charges of aiding and abetting before this insanity ends. And it will end, badly, if I don’t get Gaire out of my doppelganger head. I know I should just forget him—I’m sure he’s forgotten me—but Gaire is the first and only being who has made me feel real, alive, and, well, human. I’ll be damned if I’m giving up on that.
As I stare up at Jane from the pavement, I’m thinking how perfect this chick would be. I could head back to Leesburg, she would stay in Orlando on her street corner, and our paths should never cross. Unless it’s in a morgue somewhere—a street-walker’s life is a hard one.
In her early twenties, Jane is blonde and tan, wearing a lewdly short skirt and a lacy bra barely covered by a leather vest. Black boots with four-inch heels caress the undersides of her knees as she struts toward a car pulling up to the curb a few yards down from the streetlight on her corner.
I cozy up closer as Jane leans toward the black sedan, filling the window with the contents of her lacy bra.
Both hands now on the window of the car door, Jane is doing her thing, enticing, pimping her carte du jour, negotiating à la cart—palatable little hors d’oeuvres or entrées off the full-service menu—and distracting, while she slowly removes the pistol at her back, reaches down, and slides it into her boot.
I slither upward off the pavement, over the front tire, another moving shadow on a street accustomed to shadows.
Automobiles hedge from traffic light to traffic light, corner to corner. Pedestrians pour in and out of seedy establishments while the streetwise hawk their wares—a night like any other night on the trail.
I move, unnoticed, over the shiny bumper and onto the hood of the automobile, and there I lie, red eyes glimmering, watching, and learning.
The man inside the car wears a dark suit and tie with a white shirt. His hair is neatly trimmed, parted to the side, not a lock out of place. His randy smile displays straight white teeth, a cleanly shaved jaw-line under intense gray eyes. As he reaches over to open the door for Jane, a gentlemanly gesture during an ungentlemanly proposal, the light from the streetlamp on Jane’s corner dances off gold cufflinks. It draws my attention to his well-manicured fingernails.
Boy, is this guy going to be so totally unaware when I, doppelganger, walk out of the hotel room wearing a post-coital grin, and Jane. The surprise will come later when he tries to take a shower and finds Jane—not the carbon copy, the real thing—lying in the tub. One thing is for sure: he’s about to have mind-blowing sex and a night he’ll never forget.
As I slide into the front seat with Jane and pool into the shadows under the dashboard on the car floor. I amuse myself with a notion my mother is gonna hate my new outfit.
“So, what’s your name?” the guy in the suit says. “Or are we not supposed to ask that?” He chuckles tensely, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road as he coasts down Orange Blossom Trail.
“Oh, you can ask, sweetie, long as you got two big ones, you can ask anything you want. Name’s Jane … you?”
Without hesitation, he answers, “How about you call me Dick?”
I almost laugh, not like they can hear me if I do, but still.
Jane laughs and I revel in it. “Cute. So, Dick, where ya takin’ me?
“As far as you’ll let me.” Again with the edgy laugh.
Jane reaches down and pats the Smith & Wesson 9mm stuffed in her black boot and resting nicely against her right calf. “If you got the money, sweet cheeks, I got all night.”
Jane’s words, the ones that had attracted me to her earlier tonight, play over in my mind. “The only way to a man’s heart is through his chest cavity” she’d told another hooker before they’d split and headed toward their respective corners on the trail.
“You kill me, Jane,” the other hooker had said over her shoulder as she laughed and walked away.
Oh, cold and retched life of a doppie be damned, what if I’m choosing a serial killer, or worse, a man hater!
I feel the car hook a right and take a small bump before it makes a hard left and then comes to a stop. Purple and green light blinks on Jane’s face as she says with disgust, “Haven’t been to the Ambassador in a while. You paying by the hour or night, hon?”