“I don’t want her back.”
“Then let me put it another way: she’s never going to forgive you.”
“You don’t think she’ll eventually thank me?”
“Not a chance.”
I thought about that a bit. “Okay,” I said. “It’s still worth it.”
In all, Lauren and I were together six hours. The first hour we rehearsed her lines, over and over. Then I ordered room service. We rehearsed another thirty minutes while waiting for the food. Lunch came and we ate it and chatted about life in general.
I couldn’t get over how much she looked like Kathleen Gray. Lauren didn’t have Kathleen’s spark, of course, or her gift of gab, or her capacity to be adorable. Yet she had something special going for her in a Kathleen sort of way.
After lunch, since I was paying for her time anyway and since she looked so much like Kathleen Gray, we had a little casual sex.
Then I beat the shit out of her.
We rehearsed her lines again while I waited for her bruises to bloom. Then I took pictures and got the information about her ex and asked if she had a preference how she wanted the hit to go down. She said, “Two things. First, I want him to suffer.”
“Of course you do.”
“Wait,” she said. “This is really going to happen, isn’t it?”
I smiled. “What’s the second thing?”
“I want to watch him die.”
I smiled again. “Of course you do.”
She asked, “Am I bad?”
I shrugged. “Hey, he’s got to die sometime, right? Now don’t over-think this. It’ll be fun. You’ll see.”
One quick glance and I forgot all about Joe DeMeo.
It was Saturday, a couple hours after my meeting with DeMeo at the cemetery. I was staying in a luxury beach hotel in Santa Monica when she knocked on the door.
Jenine.
The first thing she noticed was the envelope fat with cash on the edge of the coffee table. She picked it up and her eyes widened as she riffled through the stack of hundreds. She glanced at me to see if I was serious.
I nodded.
She’d been advertising on Aspiring Actresses, the internet escort site, and had purchased enough space to display three sultry photographs and a bio listing her vital statistics and limited acting experience.
In the e-mails we exchanged, she admitted being desperate for cash, and I had agreed to share some of mine in return for what might happen when we eventually met.
When she’d called from the lobby, I gave my room number and wondered-having been previously burned in similar encounters-if the girl who showed would bear any resemblance to the photos I’d seen.
