“Buy you a drink, though,” Lucas said.
“I was waitin’ to hear that,” she said. She lifted a finger to the bartender and said, “Eddie...”
“Yeah, I know—expensive and sweet.”
“You are such asugar bear,” she said. She knocked a cigarette out of the pack, tapped the end on the bar to pack in the tobacco, and asked Lucas, “What’s your story, big guy?”
“I’m just a guy,” Lucas said.
“A married guy,” she said, as she fired up the cigarette. He was wearing a ring.
“Yeah, somewhat.”
“Only somewhat?”
“You know how that goes...” Lucas said.
The bartender came over, put down a tall dark drink that smelled of sugar, and handed her a toothpick on which he’d speared three maraschino cherries. She sucked off two of them, then she took a sip of the drink and Lucas asked, “What the heckisthat?”
“Jim Beam Single Barrel,” the bartender said, “and Coca-Cola. We call it an Oh-Va Libre.”
Lucas winced, turned back to McDonald, and asked, “What’s your name?”
“Triste,” she said, sucking off the third cherry. “It’s French... like Oh-Va.”
The whole cherry-sucking thing was both hilarious and the tiniest bit erotic, but it would have taken a mean bastard to laugh at her. Lucas didn’t. The girl, he thought, was probably younger than his daughter Letty, now in her second year at Stanford.
—
ANYWAY,one thing led to another, and Lucas never did make it to Memphis. At midnight, after a few more margaritas and three more trips to the rooster room, he and McDonald wound up at the Motel 6 on the other side of I-55. Lucas hadn’t more than gotten the room door shut when the girl popped the belt on her jeans and stripped them off, with her sandals, then pulled the blouse off. Lucas was still wearing his suit coat, though he’d stuffed his tie in his coat pocket.
“What do you think?” Triste asked, fists on her hips. She had pale cone-shaped breasts, tipped with the same pink color as a Barbie doll butt. They stood straight out, and wobbled when she spoke.
“How old are you, anyway?” Lucas asked.
“Fifteen,” she said.
Then she snatched up her jeans and started screaming her head off.
Three seconds later, as she huddled in the corner with her jeans held to her breasts, the cops came through the door. With a key, Lucas noticed; no point in kicking down a perfectly good motel-room door.
—
THE FIRST COPthrough the door was a tall, rangy blond guy with muscles in his face. He looked angry with the world and willing to do something about it, preferably with a gun. He had a flattop haircut with well-waxed front edges; and he had a big blued automaticin his right hand. He pointed it at Lucas’s head and shouted, “On the wall, asshole. On the wall.”
Lucas thought,Oh shit, because if the guy screwed up, Lucas could wind up dead. He turned, hands over his head, facing the wall, and the cop yelled, “Hands on the wall, ass-wipe. Push your feet back. Push your feet back, weight on your hands.”
Lucas said, “I didn’t know—”
“Shut the fuck up!”
The second cop through the door was shorter than the first, roly-poly, with a reddish mustache and sparse red hair. He looked like a woodchuck, or maybe a beaver, Lucas thought. Both cops were wearing chest cameras. The woodchuck asked Triste, “You all right, girl?”
Triste, speaking to the cameras, said, “He said we were gonna watch a movie. He tried to force me...”
“Put your clothes back on then,” the short cop said.
Lucas was leaning on the wall with both hands, but turned his head toward the girl and saw her grin at the cop. The blond cop had put his gun back in his holster, patted Lucas’s hips and around his beltline and down his legs, then said, “Hands behind your back. You been trying to fuck this little high school girl, huh? Well, tonight’s your unlucky night.”
