When Dick gives Jane nothing but a smile, she adds, “Full night’s cheaper if you wanna spend some time, is all I’m sayin’.”
Her nose wrinkles and her mouth tightens. She turns away, opening the car door. Together we step out, Jane dragging me along, a dark shadow under her feet. We head toward a bottom-of-the-barrel hotel on the nastiest block of West Colonial Drive in Orlando, but hey, it’s less than a mile from Jane’s corner and most importantly, her car.
Dick has a key, looks like he knows where he’s going as he gets out of the car and takes the lead.
We walk through a lobby—I glide—and past a murky aquarium with no fish, water lines descending with evaporation. But the fish tank is larger than the television balancing on a microwave table beside it.
Dick nods at a questionable character behind the desk. I can smell him from the heels of Jane’s boots, sickly sweet cocaine-sweat, bad personal hygiene, and day old sex.
The furniture in the lobby is Salvation Army Naugahyde and the walls are dark green. Everything else screams “rooms by the hour.” West Colonial Drive at its finest … drugs, sex, filth, and destitution. Ashtrays overflow onto faux wood tables, yellowed newspaper scatters the floors, and duct tape partially seals holes in the walls. I would think the tape is a bigger expense than plaster, but hey, given the frayed edges, I would say it gives roaches and rats easy access to the soul of the place where they can wander in and out of the rest of the hotel.
As we head into the elevator, I spy a sign that reads “free breakfast”—most likely stale coffee, but this clientele probably doesn’t even notice. Shady-looking men, the kind that are interested in really bad things, linger around the sign. Before the elevator doors close, one guy tells another he had invited the little girl in 219 to his room to see his horsey, and I make a mental note to return here through the sewer system with a few of my friends from Down Under.
As Dick presses the number 2 on the elevator wall and Jane turns to face the closing doors, I sidle around back of her and my head rolls over a shoe-twisted cigarette, red lipstick halfway up the filter.
A few minutes later we all step into a nightmare—the room is purple, bright purple—with tracks of humidity-driven grime running down walls from a window-shaker trying to keep up in ninety degree temperatures outside this box of debauched delights. The carpet is void of color from years of wear-and-tear, along with numerous ejected, projected, ejaculated, and exsanguinated bodily excrements I care not to fully entertain. A mottled burgundy spread is thrown haphazardly across the bed, and sheets hang from beneath in wrinkled wads. Pillows in gray and rumpled cases scatter against a black, leather headboard, bearing one of those metal boxes that charge four quarters to shake the bedbugs awake.
Although I’m quite comfortable Down Under in the sewers where my kind subsists—thrives, even—I don’t feel right using Jane’s body for sex in this bacteria-breeding, petri-dish of a room. Problem is, if I don’t, she will. I would have to watch while I wait for the opportunity to double up on her.
What to do, what to do? I’m tossing around ideas, none workable, when Dick turns the locks on the door, walks across the room, and drops his car keys on a nightstand.
All pleasantries gone, he asks, “Want a drink?”
He reaches for a paper bag in a cubby beside the bed. I slowly shrink my form under Jane’s feet until it’s barely discernable.
“No thanks, hon, but you go ahead. I’m gonna hit the toilet and freshen up,” she tells him, and I think, that’s my girl, as Jane turns toward a dingy door in a dark corner of the room. “Oh, and put the cash on the dresser, will ya?” she says with a wave of her hand.
Wearing a deadly grin, Dick watches Jane’s swagger as he pulls a distinctively squarish bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon out of the bag and works off a seal of wax that looks like blood dripping down its sides. I spread out and freeze. I know the bottle and the brand because the first prostitute I doubled up on tonight propositioned an undercover cop. At the police station four hours ago, I had seen the same bottle of bourbon in three pictures—three crime scenes—in an open case file on a detective’s computer screen. The file also displayed pictures of butchered and bloody women.
Jane isn’t Dick’s decadent fantasy of pleasures. She’s his next victim.