“Is this your car?” she asked, running her hand along the seats and up my thigh.
“Yes it is.”
“Wow. You rich?”
“Yes I am.” Her eyes lit up. Yeah, Velvet thought if she let me do whatever I wanted she’d have some sugar-daddy set up.
Note to my future protégé. When you hire someone to do a job expect them to do the job and then pay them. If they don’t do they job, they don’t get paid.
“What are we doing here?” she asked when I pulled into the warehouse I had owned for the past decade. I liked to bring my new friends there.
“Don’t worry. I’m not some serial killer. There’s no plastic restraints or tarp in the back seat. “I just like to be alone. I like my privacy.”
Of course the girl looked in the back seat when she thought I wasn’t looking. There were the tell-tale signs that she was in bad need of some kind of fix.
Personally I hated drugs. Couldn’t stand them or the people that used them. They were weak, pathetic individuals who wanted to be victims. They wanted to live this way.
“So.” I said as I walked into the warehouse in front of Velvet. When I flipped on the light she instantly saw the lounge area I had set up in the nearest corner. “Make yourself comfortable.”
Walking over to the couch she sat down on the edge of the couch. The lighting wasn’t the best and it highlighted her bruises and scratches and weeping sores that were crusted over with make-up. In a dark alley she might have looked pretty. But under even the faintest fluorescent lighting she looked like someone had sewn together various human parts collected from a leper colony.
“Can I get you a drink?”
“Sure.”
“What would you like?”
“Anything is fine.” Her voice was nervous. She was itching to make an exchange so she could be on her way to her dealer.
“Anything…coming right up.”
I brought her some water. She smelled it before she took a drink as if her finely tunes Spider-senses would pick up any drug I might have slipped in it. I don’t think pure H2O had touched her tongue in months so it was funny to watch her reaction as she almost choked.
“Hey, come over here.” I said, jerking my head in the direction of a darker corner of the warehouse. “Are you ready to have some fun?”
As expected, she didn’t say much. I was kind of glad. Velvet wasn’t really a talker. The girl I was with last night that was a different story. She wouldn’t shut the hell up. But Velvet was a little more cautious.
“Don’t worry.” I coaxed her. “I told you, I’m not some serial killer. I’m just a little eccentric, that’s all. I’ll admit it. We all have our little quirks and ticks, right?” I smiled at her but she barely met my eyes.
When I flipped the other switch she saw that there was just a chair there. One single chair. No long table of surgical instruments. No yards of rope and chain but just one little harmless chair.
“Have a seat.”
“Just sit there?”
“Yup. Just sit right there.”
She shuffled up to the chair and sat down on the edge.
“Get comfortable, honey. We’ve got some talking to do. Tell me,” I walked up to her, squatted down and took on of her disgustingly boney hands in mine. Her nails were all chewed and the dark blue polish was chipped.
“Tell me when you lost your virginity.”
“What?”
I took out a roll of money and watched as she practically began to salivate.
“Tell me.” I said, peeling a twenty-dollar bill off the roll.