“Well now, Mr Jerome, we might have ourselves a little issue with that. You see, little ole’ Michelle has gone and gotten herself a bit of an expensive habit and she’s managed to run up a sizable debt to me. Although, I must say, she is working real hard to pay it off, she’s doing a sterling job. I got her doing a little hospitality work for some of my clients, if you get my drift?”
“Dealing ain’t enough for you, Newt? You fancy yourself as a pimp as well, eh? Tell me, do you know how old that girl is?”
“Now, there’s knowing,” he shrugged, “and then there’s caring.”
I wanted to wipe that smug, despicable smirk clean off his face. Ten years previous and I’d have already been in the process of beating the skinny bastards face so bad his own mother wouldn’t have been able to recognise him, but that was a different time, almost a whole other lifetime. I’d found, to my credit, that diplomacy and turning the other cheek usually got cleaner results, and was a whole lot safer too.
“Cosy little operation you got going here, Newt. Dope, moonshine and heroin. The cops ever take an interest in you?”
“I think you’ll find that my associates and the local PD have come to something of a gentlemen’s agreement. I don’t know the details, I just know that as long as I keep my operation discreet, the heat stay out of my way.”
“Nice. And I take it you make a pretty sweet living from this game?”
“Well, let’s be honest here. My associates, the guys higher up the chain, I’ve no doubt they must be making at least ten times what I’m earning. But see here. My neighbour, he gets up at 5am, six days a week, he has to drive to the far side of town to work a ten hour shift in a factory that cans dog food. And he barely earns enough to pay his rent each week. I, on the other hand, never get up before 11am, my customers come to me and I earn easily four times as much as my neighbour, my rent is paid for by my associates and I get all the free beer, dope and pussy I want. How much do you earn, Mr Jerome? Come to think of it, how much pussy d’you get these days?”
Again, I had to resist the temptation to pulverise the young punks face. I was done listening to him, it was time to make my play.
“Okay, Newt, enough bullshit, let’s cut to the chase. The girl leaves with me. Now. Otherwise, I have to inform her parents where their daughter is, and what she’s doing here, and they will get the cops involved. The cops might be happy to turn a blind eye to your drug dealing, but unlawfully holding a minor against the will of her legal guardians, not to mention the wilful exploitation of said minor through prostitution? And, if someone were to, say, tip off the local press about what was going down, well they’d be all over it like a rash. The cops would have no choice but to put your gentlemen’s agreement to one side and ensure that justice is seen to be done. In short, they would nail your scrawny ass to the nearest tree. You’d be lucky if you got off with less than a ten stretch, and of course – you know full well what would happen to a skinny little guy like you behind bars, don’t you?”
For once, the little shit had nothing to say.
“So, I think we agree that it is in the best interests of all concerned if the girl leaves with me. I don’t wish to know nor care about the size of the outstanding debt that she owes you,” I said, as I produced a padded envelope from my coat pocket. “But in this envelope is $75 in cash. This is very much a one time offer, and the only scenario on the table that doesn’t end with you in a jail cell squealing like a pig. It ensures mine and the girls safe passage out of here, and causes you to write off any additional debt that she might owe you. In fact, I’d advise that you forget that she was ever here, right?”
I tossed the envelope down on the floor next to him. He grunted unintelligibly, shrugged his hunched shoulders and then turned his attention back to the radio.
Michelle Masters was eighteen years of age, and the photograph her family had given to me showed her to be tall, blonde, of slender build and stunningly beautiful, yet wholesome and innocent. I located her in the back room of the drugs den, slumped on a couch – she bore very little resemblance to the girl in the photo now. Her features were emaciated, her once glowing eyes appeared sunken and dull. She was wearing a cheap, black negligee that left nothing to the imagination – she looked like a washed up whore. She was deathly pale, but thankfully breathing. She was barely conscious and I could see she was wholly incapable of standing, so I scooped her up in my arms and made for the exit. I felt vulnerable as I couldn’t easily get at my gun while carrying her.
I half expected Newt to try and pull something stupid as I walked through the sitting room, but he hadn’t moved a muscle - the envelope still lay on the floor where I’d thrown it. He’d obviously drifted off somewhere within his dope addled mind – and a huge part of me wished he’d end up permanently stuck there, never to return.
I carried the girl out into the cool, night air, dumped her rather unceremoniously into the back of my car, then set off at speed to the emergency room.
It was around 9.30 AM the following morning by the time I was finally able to leave the hospital. The girl had been drifting in and out of consciousness for the duration of the drive to the hospital, but as I parked up outside she began to convulse, was violently sick all over the rear interior of my car, then slumped back and promptly stopped breathing. I hurriedly carried her inside where she was quickly set upon by a posse of emergency doctors and nurses. It was touch and go for quite a while – she’d massively OD’d, I honestly thought she was a goner but eventually, she pulled through. Just. I didn’t want to give myself too much credit but I was almost certain that she’d have died that night if I hadn’t intervened when I did. I don’t know what Newt would have done, but I suspected that he wouldn’t have been above disposing of a body. I dare say she’d have surfaced a few days later, floating face down in one of the local waterways, or in a black bag at the garbage dump.
I stopped briefly to use the telephone in the hospital foyer to call Lydia, my PA. I make the distinction that Lydia was not just my secretary – it’s a cliché but all private detectives seemed to have a secretary, but secretarial work was just the beginning of her talents. Sure, she greeted my clients, typed up my case notes and made great coffee, but she also looked after all my legal and financial paperwork too. She was a rare diamond, and I certainly paid her more than your average secretary would expect to get – for someone who could keep the IRS off my back I figured it was money well spent.
“J.Jerome Private Investigations, Lydia speaking.”
“Hey, sweetheart, it’s Johnny.”
“Johnny, where the hell are you? Dr Masters has called three times already this morning looking for an update, you said you’d call him last night.”
“I found her, Lydia, but she was in a bad way. But don’t worry, she’s safe now, she’s at St Judes, call him back and let him know, alright?”
“Got it, Johnny, nice work.”
“Oh, and can you get that fella’ from East and Twenty-Third to come down town and valet the car. There was a bit of an unfortunate – accident.”
“Sounds lovely, Johnny, will do. Hey, you got a visitor, been waiting here for you to show since I opened up. You heading back this way anytime soon?”
“Yeah, should be about twenty minutes, who you got there?”
“A Mr Jameson, a lawyer – another missing person I think.”
I hated lawyers, the financial blood-sucking parasites that they are, but when a lawyer walks in as a client, well that’s different. There was simply no such thing as a poor lawyer, I had a scale of fees specifically for lawyers. It started at fifteen percent higher than what I’d charge for anyone else, and increased at twice the normal rate if the job got complicated. I had no moral or ethical dilemmas with this practice, and in reality I’d only ever stand to claw back a tiny percentage of the amount of money that various lawyers would screw out of me, so I what the hell.