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  The first thing Fortney said when he rafted up to the Bayliner was “Okay, gentlemen, we’re here to help, but first thing we do is, we put on these.”

  Leeds tossed six dumb-looking orange life jackets to the bangers, who said things like “Shee-it, we gotta wear these funky things? We rather drown, man!”

  “Gotta be nice and safe when we’re doing a heroic rescue,” Leeds told them.

  The bangers couldn’t stop glaring at the teenagers on the beach, who were dissing them louder than ever, and when the cops were finally motoring the jacketed bangers back to the boat rental, Fortney got the bad-eye from the most sullen one, who had a high-top haircut with nubs on top.

  So Fortney said, “I know how it is, dude. Awful hard to style with those goofy fucking jackets on. Kinda makes you look like the plastic cones they use for roadwork.”

  —

  Late that Saturday afternoon Serenity Jones received a call on her cell phone while she soaked her bulk in the bathtub, devouring chocolate-chip cookies and the National Enquirer.

  She picked up the call on the third ring as usual and was surprised to hear the familiar voice of number sixty-three.

  “Please tell our redhead to change the location tonight,” he told her. “Ask her to meet me at eight o’clock. Corner of Rosecrans and Shelter Island Drive in Point Loma. I’ll be parked near the intersection.”

  “Fab, darling,” Serenity said. “I’ll see she gets the message. Anything else?”

  “No,” he said, “nothing else.”

  Blaze Duvall was also surprised to hear that sixty-three was changing the location. He’d never done that before. He was very anal, sixty-three was, rigid and predictable. Once he’d told her that he seldom wore a necktie that he hadn’t bought from the same mail-order catalog. He said that some of the ties cost a hundred dollars, but were worth it because they were “utterly reliable.” Blaze had wondered at the time what a necktie had to do to be utterly reliable, but she’d let it pass.

  Now she was wondering why he’d be meeting her in his car. Apparently, he’d be taking her somewhere. She hoped to hell he wasn’t in the mood for a “real date.” It happened sometimes with clients his age. Instead of a massage and a quick blowjob in a motel room, they’d get all sentimental about a candlelight dinner. Then Blaze would have to let them know gently that a massage took far less time than dinner, no matter how pleasant such an evening would be. And that she just didn’t have the time, working as she did all day long as a licensed massage therapist in the proper office of a physician who specialized in pain control through massage and acupuncture.

  All of which was bullshit. Blaze had learned all she knew about massage from rented videos and a how-to manual she’d read in thirty minutes. But the clients wanted to believe she was legit, that the extra things she did was because they had “rapport.” That such an obviously intelligent young woman recognized special needs that could never be satisfied by wives or regular girlfriends. Clients were always quick to reassure Blaze that hers was the first “massage of its kind” they’d ever received, and that they had only contacted her in the first place because of recommendations from “a very upscale massage salon” frequented by downtown businessmen.

  As if Blaze Duvall gave a shit. Actually, the downtown massage salon wasn’t downtown but on El Cajon Boulevard in the vicinity of North Park, where street whores occupied ten blocks of the boulevard, day and night. The salon was operated by an old pal of Serenity Jones’s, who referred very promising clients to Serenity when the client wanted “something special” that the salon didn’t dare provide because of unannounced visits from vice cops.

  Blaze got dressed for the appointment the way number sixty-three preferred women to dress: tailored. That’s what he’d told her the first time they’d met. She decided on a plaid linen jacket and long pants of linen and wool, all in neutral shades of beige. Under it she wore a long-sleeved creamy cotton blouse, and with it of course sensible pumps. That’d suit him.

  She knew without a doubt he’d be wearing a blue blazer, gray or tan trousers, and loafers. Since it was Saturday night he’d also be wearing a white or blue dress shirt and one of those hundred-dollar neckties that he called “old boy” ties.

  Blaze hoped this wasn’t going to be one of those let’s-have-a-real-date episodes. They could get so gooey. She had to think for a minute whether he’d know her yellow Mustang. He was always in the motel room when she arrived, and they’d never left together. Well, that was his problem. He was the one who had changed the location to a goddamn street corner.

  While driving to Point Loma at dusk, she thought that rather than a lengthy story as to why she couldn’t go on a boring dinner date, she’d rather blow him right there in his car. That’s what Dawn would do. But the Dawn Coyotes of this world went to jail often and got hurt and even murdered doing their work in cars. Sometimes they got killed by tricks they’d done business with safely on other occasions. There were lots of unsolved prostitute murders in San Diego, like everywhere else.

  When Blaze arrived, she spotted him right away, sitting behind the wheel of a ten-year-old red Cadillac Seville, nervously fiddling with his old-boy necktie.

  He saw her and waved shyly.

  When she drove up beside his car, he mouthed the words “Follow me” and drove off, leading her out toward the naval base, toward a pricy part of Point Loma called La Playa, where she’d never been.

  He pulled to the curb on a quiet residential street just off Rosecrans and Blaze pulled in behind him. He leaned out the window and gestured for her to lock her car, so she got out carrying her beach duffel crammed with powder, oils, and other implements.

  “I’m taking you home, Blaze,” he said, opening the door of the Cadillac. “I have something very important to discuss with you.”

  “Okay,” she said with her sunniest smile, but feeling some apprehension.

  As the Cadillac snaked around the narrow streets, climbing ever higher toward the top of the point, he didn’t say a word. This was unpredictable, but she felt that sixty-three was harmless, a very shy and polite older gentleman.

  It was reassuring for her to recall how, when they’d begun their relationship seven months earlier, she’d told him that it was better for both of them if he never used his name, just a number when he phoned, one he’d remember.

  “Sixty-three,” he’d replied instantly, not explaining the choice.

  She’d jotted it down without comment. But on one occasion when he was in the bathroom showering after his massage, she’d peeked in his wallet to learn his true name and address. In her business you never knew when such information might come in handy.

  She’d had to stifle a giggle upon reading his birthdate. Very predictable. He was sixty-three years old.

  CHAPTER 3

  The office walls were painted your basic police-station bilious green. Everything else, including desks and file cabinets, was mucous gray. But the “designer” had added a touch that vice officers called “nouvelle cop,” a no-nap bile-green carpet that showed every coffee stain and ended up looking like camouflage tarps from the Gulf War. The cops repaired all rips with gray duct tape.

  “I don’t believe this!” Officer Rita Mason said to her eyebrows when she encountered Letch Boggs that evening. He was all alone in the vice office, feet on a table, doing what he did best.

  Letch was watching a confiscated videotape. In the tape a naked woman was writhing on a bed to background music by Madonna. And trying her damnedest to insert a baby boa into her own vagina, tail first.

  Letch hadn’t heard Rita Mason come in. Engrossed, he was munching on one of those horrible tomato-and-garlic sandwiches he brought from home. She saw a Pepsi bottle beneath the desk, also from home, no doubt. The leering hamster was notoriously cheap and never patronized the drink machines. As usual, he was wearing one of those cheesy Hawaiian shirts, this one covered with the world’s ugliest pink flamingos, resembling turtles on stilts.

  Finally Letch not
iced Rita behind him, all tarted-up for another evening on the john detail: Day-Glo green satin shorts, knee-high green plastic boots with spike heels, a white peekaboo chemise, a sequined jacket on top. Her hair was ratted and teased and she thought she looked disgusting.

  Letch thought she was devastating. He loved girls this large in the bustle. Displaying his leer, he said, “Gosh, you look smashing, Rita!”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” she responded. “Sixteen guys teaching me how to become a slut? Only thing this outfit lacks is neon. What’re you doing watching that garbage again? Don’t you have any shame?” Then she answered herself: “Dumb question.”

  “I’m only paying close attention to the wallpaper, Rita,” Letch said. “I think I know where this was taped. A motel over on Midway Drive.”

  Rita sneered at the randy vice cop. “Uh-huh. And how about the snake? Recognize him?”

  “I think he works down in the mayor’s office, but I ain’t sure.” Letch mashed the last of the garlic cloves with those rodentlike teeth of his, saying, “Go, snake! Go!”

  “You’re sick!” Rita said. “I can’t wait to go back to patrol, where I only gotta deal with nice clean stabbings and drive-bys.”

  Letch sighed and turned off the TV. “Okay, Rita, let’s go to work. I watch any more a this, I’ll start slapping my slinky.”

  “You really are a revolting old pervert!” Rita said sincerely. Then she took a closer look at the Pepsi bottle on the floor. “Why’s that Pepsi yellow?”

  To which Letch failed to respond.

  “What’s in that freaking bottle?” Rita demanded. “Is it what I think it is?”

  “I could find more compassion in a Tijuana bullring,” Letch said grumpily, gathering his gun, handcuffs, and flashlight. “I don’t have a jelly bean for a prostate. I’m fifty-three years old, for chrissake. My prostate’s bigger’n your left tit, and it’s a long walk to the head. And, anyways, I didn’t wanna leave at the good part. You know, where the snake looks around with that goofy look on his serpent kisser? Like he’s saying, It’s not the booze, honey. I really do care about you. That part.”

  Rita Mason was getting green around the gills. “I’ll meet you in the car. Take that bottle and pour it in the goddamn toilet!”

  While she was stalking down the hall in her spike-heeled boots, she heard Letch muttering something about passing a kidney stone bigger than Alcatraz.

  When they were driving out to El Cajon Boulevard in Letch’s brown Camaro vice car, preparing to rendezvous with two vice teams who would tune to the transmitter Rita wore under her bra, Letch said, “You know a whore named Dawn Coyote? Junkie? Skinny blonde? Always got the shakes?”

  “I’ve seen a girl like that out there,” Rita said. “Why?”

  “I been trying to nail her old man. Pimp named Oliver Mantleberry. I hear when she’s having domestic problems with Oliver—like when he’s kicked the living piss outta her—she takes her baby to the streets with her. And I hear he stomped her ass last night.”

  “What’s she do with the baby?”

  “A snitch told me she puts the little whelp in that motel we busted last month. The Dream Scene Motel?”

  “How old’s the baby?”

  “Plenty old enough to take care of himself,” Letch said. “About ten months, I think.”

  “Jesus,” Rita said. “Gimme a good stabbing or a drive-by. You can have this vice shit.”

  “Anyways,” Letch said, “when you’re out there looking oh-so-cute and getting lots a offers from all the horny Harrys, keep an eye out for Dawn. You see her, just talk into the wire. Tell me where she’s at, what she’s doing. Tell me if you see a black pimp in a white Jag cruising the boulevard.”

  “Four more weeks.” Rita Mason sighed. “Then I’m outta here.”

  “I used to know a massage-parlor hooker that looked just like you,” Letch said, working those graybrown eyebrows that looked like proned-out chipmunks. “She gave me a massage with rubber gloves on before I busted her. Now every time I go to a supermarket and see Playtex Living gloves I get a big woody. You ever consider giving a guy a massage?”

  “Sure, Letch,” she said. “Long as I can use an oil substitute.”

  “Saliva?”

  “Ground glass.”

  “Gee, I’ll miss you, Rita,” Letch said dreamily.

  With a curling lip: “Me too, Letch. Just like I’d miss lawyers and vaginal warts. Or a horned toad in my panty hose.”

  —

  While Officer Rita Mason was getting ready to take offers of sex for money from horny Harrys who’d be swooped up by lurking vice cops, Blaze Duvall was entering the hillside Point Loma home of number sixty-three, the man she’d called “Jeremy” during previous encounters. A man she knew from her surreptitious search of his wallet to be Ambrose Willis Lutterworth, Jr.

  “It’s not much of a house,” he said, turning on the light in the living room and locking the front door behind them.

  “Wow!” Blaze was stunned by the breathtaking view through the picture window. At this time of evening the rising moon was hanging over the twinkling high-rise office buildings studding the waterfront, and the sky and glassy harbor were lavender in the vanishing twilight.

  Ambrose Lutterworth chuckled nervously. “As they say in real estate: location location location. The house is badly built and worthless, but the land’s worth plenty. It’s a double lot, actually.”

  Blaze put her blue duffel on the sofa, pretending to admire the furnishings but reassuring herself there was not someone lurking in one of the spooky little nooks.

  “Would you like a drink, Blaze?” he asked. “We’ve never had the opportunity to raise a glass before, not in those motel rooms.”

  “Sure. White wine if you have it.”

  “I’ve got a bottle in the fridge,” he said. “Make yourself comfortable.”

  After he disappeared into the kitchen, Blaze peeked into the little study just off the living room. The entire house was meticulous. On his desk number-two pencils lay in perfect formation, each the same length.

  When she heard the refrigerator door open, she risked taking a few steps down the hall to look into what appeared to be an old lady’s bedroom. There was a lace doily on the back of a worn-out reading chair and the lamp table beside it was covered by a lace tablecloth, starched and white. The bed was a double four-poster, like in a moldy movie set.

  Blaze hurried back to the tidy living room before he returned, and managed a smile when he handed her the crystal wineglass.

  He poured one for himself, then motioned to the leather chesterfield sofa. “Sit down, Blaze. There, where you can enjoy the view. When the city lights all come on it’s very beautiful. That’s part of the reason I haven’t sold. I’d miss the city lights.”

  Blaze sipped the wine. “Very good. Chardonnay?”

  “Right you are, Blaze,” he said. “You’re obviously a sophisticated girl who appreciates fine things. I’ve known you were special from the first.”

  Here it comes. I want to get to know you better, Blaze. I’m lonely, Blaze. Perhaps we could go on dates. Perhaps…

  He stopped her by saying, “I’m going to give you the chance to make some money. Real money. I’m going to make you a business offer.”

  With a cute but seductive smile this time: “As Dumbo would say, I’m all ears.”

  “First of all,” he said, “my name isn’t Jeremy. It’s Ambrose. Ambrose Lutterworth.”

  “Well, I can understand the need to be careful.”

  “I wonder if your real name is Blaze?”

  “Yes, it really is.”

  “Suits you. That lovely flaming hair.”

  “Thank you…Ambrose.”

  “That’s better. I like to hear you use my true name.”

  She looked discreetly at her watch and said, “I’m afraid I don’t have a lotta time, Ambrose.”

  “Don’t worry about the time, Blaze,” he said. “I want the entire evening. You’re going to get five
hundred dollars tonight whether or not you accept my business proposition. Is that all right?”

  “You own me,” she said with a girlish grin that brought out the dusty freckles on her nose. “For the evening.”

  “First I’d like to tell you about myself. I’m a sailing enthusiast. Do you sail?”

  “Never tried it.”

  “I used to have a thirty-three-foot sloop,” Ambrose said. “Had to sell it when the real-estate market crashed. I’m also a realtor, you see.”

  For five hundred she could put up with it, so she unbuttoned her jacket and took another sip. At least the wine was good, better than she could afford.

  —

  Officer Rita Mason did a lot of damage to male libidos that Saturday evening. She bagged three motoring johns before she was out there an hour. It was a very busy evening on El Cajon Boulevard, and the horny Harrys were circling the hookers like little orbiting satellites. The more they orbited, the brighter they glowed. Not one of them guessed that the buxom babe in screaming-green shorts could be a member of the San Diego Police Department. And they were really shocked to learn later that cops were no longer writing citations for prostitution offenses but were taking johns to jail.

  One of them got so horny while parked near the corner of Ohio Street trying to chisel down the price that he stuck his hand inside his pants. Rita figured him for one of those creeps who wanted to stiff the hooker by getting off in his own sweaty palm just from talking. He was still fondling himself when a blue Olds containing two mustachioed brigands squealed up beside his car.

  His head swiveled toward the vice car, then back to Rita, and he exclaimed, “Are they carjackers?”

  “Relax, honey,” Rita told him. “They don’t want your ride. And you can quit spanking little Sam. You’re busted.”

  After the vice team put the john in the backseat of their car, he cried and begged them just to write him a citation.

  “No more coupons,” Rita informed him. “It’s slam city for you, hot pants.”

  When he cried and begged them not to call his wife, Rita said wickedly, “Doesn’t your family have a right to know you’re inviting AIDS?”