Ribbons (11 page)

15

The sticker on the back of Matt’s laptop read,
I heart Turing
. Instead of the word
heart
, though, there was a picture of a heart, and the heart picture was made out of a series of 1’s and 0’s. Matt knew that the 1’s and 0’s spelled out the word
heart
in binary. He knew that because he had looked it up online after he’d stolen the laptop from a tourist at a bus station in Reno. He went on to learn all about the life and times of Alan Turing, father of computer science, and while Matt didn’t normally use his computer for much more than porn or cat videos, he did think Turing was a pretty cool guy.

Right now Matt did not
heart
Turing, or computers, or cat videos, or even porn. Right now he was on hold with tech support for his new financial software.

He leaned forward in Uncle Quent’s chair, squinting at the all the different menu options. Uncle Quent apparently kept ledgers, but when Matt had flipped through them, they made about as much since as Turing’s 1’s and 0’s. He was hoping to bring the Golden Delicious into the twentieth century. Apparently, that required waiting on hold for ten minutes listening to the Muzak version of “The Final Countdown.”

Matt was rocking out to the chorus when the music suddenly cut out and was replaced by a male voice. “Hello, sir or madam. My name is Sean. How may I help you today?”

He couldn’t quite place the accent, but this guy didn’t sound like a
Sean
.

“Oh, hey,” said Matt, “Yeah, I’m using your financial software. Well, trying to, anyway. I’m in the . . . service industry, and I want to add some new products to my sales list.”

“Sean” had a reply almost before Matt finished talking. “Our software comes with an extensive taxonomy of generic and specific product types. Are you sure there’s not one already on the list that you could use?”

Matt looked at a sticky note next to his laptop. “Some of our services have custom names. I’m pretty sure they’re not on there.”

“Can you give me an example please?” asked Sean.

“Uh . . . well, there’s a service called the Pullman’s Pushcart that—”

“One moment please. Let me just do a search.” Sean was getting ahead of himself.

Matt tried to explain. “Like I said it’s probably not in the—”

“Not in our primary list, let me just look online.”

              “You might not want to—”

              Apparently Sean had found some results online. “Oh! Oh my God!”

              “Yeah. That’s probably the one,” said Matt.

“Okay . . . uh . . . okay. Right.” This part didn’t seem to be on the script that Sean was reading from. “Yeah, just click on the pencil icon next to the Services tab.”

Now they were getting somewhere. Matt clicked on the little pencil button. “All right. Done.”

“Great. Next you should see a list of categories,” said Sean. “Click the add data icon.”

Matt saw a square icon and a cylinder icon. He tried clicking the cylinder. “Okay. I think I got it.” The list went blank. He was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to happen. “No, wait. I clicked the cylinder. Was that right?”

Sean sounded disappointed in him. “That’s not the next step.” Of course, that’s when Matt saw a plus icon a little to the left of his pointer.

“Yeah,” said Matt, “I think I screwed up. How do you go back?”

“What does the list display now?” asked Sean.

“It’s blank,” said Matt.

“I see … how blank?”

“All the way blank.”

There was a pause. When Sean spoke again he sounded hopeful but doubtful. “Did you back up your work?”

“How do you do that?” asked Matt.

“Please hold.” The Final Countdown returned.

Matt leaned back in his chair. “Shiiit.” The word came out as a long sigh.

“You want me to take a look?”

The voice startled Matt. It came from the room instead of the phone. Matt jerked his head up and saw Adam staring at him.

“Hmm? You know how to use financial software?” Matt was dubious.

“No,” said Adam, “but I play
Minecraft
.” He said it like it was a valid qualification.

Matt hung up the phone. “Well, you probably can’t break it any more than I have. But shouldn’t you be doing your own homework?”

“I’m done. I was looking for Mom. Sometimes she sneaks me down to the break room so I can watch TV. I looked down from the top of the stairs, but I didn’t see her.”

“She’s probably in the parlor,” said Matt. Then awkwardly, “Or . . . you know.”

“Yeah.” It looked like Adam
did
know what his mother might be doing at that very moment. He didn’t seem depressed about it; he just seemed resigned to a boring evening. “That’s all right.”

Matt pushed back from the desk and stood up. “I’ll tell you what. You take a look at this, and I’ll go see if she’s around.”

Adam perked up a little. “Okay. Thanks!” He took Matt’s spot at the desk. He was already clicking and typing as Matt left the room.

As Adam had said, Christy wasn’t in the foyer. It wasn’t really her job to keep an eye on the phone or act as a hostess—all the girls took turns with those duties depending on who was busy—but Christy ended up spending a lot of her free time by the reception podium so she could check on Adam, at least until he went to bed.

The parlor sounded busy. The light, ambient background music had been replaced by something more driving and thumping. A group of enthusiastic guys sat in a circle made up of a couple of couches and a love seat. The men were all in their midtwenties, and each had a drink in one hand and dollar bills in the other. Somebody had brought one of the barstools into the center of the circle. A man sat on it, bare chested and sightless, his own necktie acting as a blindfold.

Two of the girls were keeping him busy. Matt was starting to get to know the women who worked here. He was pretty sure Kendra was teasing the guy’s nipple with her tongue while Liz bit and pulled at his earlobe. His buddies took turn whispering tortures or delights into the girls’ ears and then tucking bills into their garters. Matt suspected there would be more tortures than delights before it was over.

Christy wasn’t there, so Matt went to the girl fixing drinks at the bar. Before his call with tech support, Matt had been looking at the money they had pulled in so far since he’d gotten here. A good chunk of the money came from drinks—either liquid courage to work up the nerve to request other services—or parties like this one.

Matt leaned across the bar to be heard over the music. “Amber, right?”

Amber smiled at him. “Yeah,” she said. “Down here, anyway. When you’re signing my checks upstairs it’s Jessica Dobbs. What’s up?”

There were a lot of names to remember. Matt was going to need to make flash cards. He smiled back at her. “Things seem lively.”

Amber jiggled her cocktail shaker with a flourish and then poured a line of shots. “We booked a bachelor party.”

“That seems dangerous,” said Matt. “How many weddings have we ended?”

“The wife booked this one,” said Amber. “She gave us some specific instructions. They have boundaries. But there’s always wiggle room.” She gave a teasing grin as she loaded the shots onto a serving tray.

“Is Christy with a client?” Matt asked.

“No, she has an appointment coming up, though.” Amber stepped out from behind the bar and lifted her tray. “She’s probably prepping the party room.”

Matt walked down the hall, the thumping music receding a bit. Now it just sounded like a racing heartbeat. He decided he was going to figure this place out. It seemed to be working on autopilot, but he felt kind of useless, like a freeloader. Which he was, he supposed. So far he hadn’t really done anything useful to contribute to the business. He thought he was going to start by getting the finances in order, but now that was in the hands of a nine-year-old. Maybe Christy would have some ideas. She seemed to know this place inside and out.

Matt opened the door to the party room. “Hey, Christy, Adam was—”

Erica cut him off. “You keep walking in on me. Makes me think you’re hoping for another free peek.”

She was sitting on the edge of the bed near one of the nightstands. The silver tray that normally held the room’s champagne glasses had been cleared off . . . to make room for the line of cocaine. Next to the tray was a small brass cylinder that somehow looked familiar to Matt. Erica held a glass straw between her fingers like a cigarette. There was no powder on her nose but half the line was gone.

Matt wasn’t quite sure how to react. “Is that . . . ?”

“Coke?” Erica suggested. “Yes. You want some?” She offered him the straw.

Today she was dressed like a stewardess. Not a modern unisex stewardess but more like a fantasy stewardess from the sixties who might refill your scotch before accepting your membership to the mile-high club. Somehow she made it look intimidating. Maybe it was the uniform.

“No,” said Matt, and because he couldn’t think of a real excuse, he added, “I had a big lunch.”

She stood, smirked, then she slowly bent over to the tray and put the straw up to her nose. She gave him an exaggerated wink before holding one nostril closed and sniffing up the last of the powder. She threw the straw and the cylinder into a clutch purse, and then used one finger to wipe up the last traces of dust. She stepped over to Matt and offered her finger to his mouth.

“Seems like you don’t know what you’re doing here,” she said.

Matt looked down at her finger, not daring to move his head. “Christy said Quent didn’t really allow drugs.”

She rubbed her fingers together until the powder was gone. “Well, you’re not Quent.”

She reached down and took one of Matt’s hands. He started to pull back but stopped when she raised an eyebrow. She was either scolding him or challenging him. Either way, he gave in, and she guided his hand up the side of her body and then over her breast. There was a lot of polyester between his hand and her skin, but he could still feel her nipple, already stiff.

“In fact, you don’t seem to be
anybody
. You’re just kinda along for the ride, aren’t you?”

He swallowed. “I’m somebody.”

“You sure?” she asked. She pushed into him a little and ground her hips forward. “Anyway, who do you think I got this stuff from?”

Matt could feel himself getting hard. She pulled back her hips and then pressed forward again, starting a rhythm. It began to match the thumping music from the parlor. He would be crazy to leave right now. It was a bad idea to stay but crazy to leave. Her free hand slipped past his waistband and found his ass. She squeezed it as she bit her lip and gave a little moan. It looked like a move she practiced and used all the time. Matt didn’t care. The last time he’d had sex it was after last call at a bar in California. Everybody who had still been at the bar had scrambled to make friends as quickly as possible. It had seemed more like an act of desperation then. Now somebody was literally trying to get into his pants.

Then she looked up at him. Her eyes were glazed over, and she seemed to be focusing on something well behind him. She wasn’t really there, and she didn’t really want to be with him. He was just another customer, which meant there was something she wanted from him.

Matt pulled back. He was painfully aware of the bulge in his pants. He had been on the run long enough to get a feel for how stupid he was being at any given moment. If he was being a typical dumb guy, he usually just went with it, figuring he could fix the fallout later. When he moved past that into how-are-you-not-dead-yet stupidity, his self-preservation kicked in. Fight or flight. It was usually flight.

“I better go,” he said.

She didn’t look surprised or disappointed. “Yeah, that sounds like you.”

Matt retreated to the hallway.

At the end of the hallway there was a door that led to the backyard. It wasn’t much of a yard, though. Weeds pushed up through the pea gravel, and paint flaked off an old storage shed. Matt closed the door behind him and sat on one of the three steps leading down to a patch of nothing. He stared at the empty space.

“What’s got you all moody?”

He looked up to find Christy leaning against the house, her arms crossed. She flicked the ash off a cigarette and blew smoke out the corner of her mouth.

Matt really needed to start looking around more when he opened doors. These women seemed to be ambushing him everywhere he went. “Nothing,” he said. It didn’t sound convincing at all so he added, “Everything.”

Christy pressed the cigarette to her mouth. “Yeah. Me too.”

Matt had never seen Christy smoke before, and she never smelled like she did. After his encounter with Erica, though, he certainly wasn’t going to call her on it. Instead, they just hung out in silence for a couple of minutes, Christy smoking and Matt throwing little pieces of gravel toward the shed.

He pointed his chin toward the shed. “What’s that?”