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“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I just told you that I was using the man who’s paying you.”
“He don’t own me neither.”
Clarice smiled in the back seat.
“What are the movies about?” I asked.
“What are all movies about? White men gettin’ fucked and white and brown men gettin’ killed, and then some other white men gettin’ away with it.”
“What about the characters you play?” I asked with a smile on my lips.
“I can answer that if you could tell me what the characters are of the women you see splayed out in the old Playboy magazine.”
“So you don’t believe in love?”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
We arrived at the parking lot in front of Claxton’s, a converted warehouse where dozens of young people of all races and persuasions were hanging around out front, smoking and talking, some of them getting high.
“Drive around the left side, Joe,” my client said. “They have people to park your car back there.”
“You want me to come in on this one?”
“Yeah. I’d like to have one pair of eyes just looking out for me.”
The room was cavernous and loud. The music was the new interbred hip-hop, rap, and pop, with a little R & B salted in at the corners. It wasn’t my kind of music, but I’m sure that my heroes, Monk and Miles, would have seen clearly what for me was only hinted at inside the cries, shouts, and concussions of the performances.
I stayed as close to Clarice as I could as she danced with calculated abandon. Her partners changed from one to another in quick succession, and only once did I have to intervene.
A young man of many races, and in fine fashion that had been designed by a tight budget, got upset when the lady decided to move to another partner. He grabbed her by the biceps and shouted something that I didn’t understand. I moved in quickly, prying the young man’s fingers off my charge’s arm. He reached toward the back of his pants and I fell into a fast squat, pulling his loose trousers and boxers down around the ankles. I also got hold of the pistol he’d been grabbing for. I stood up and took a step backward. He tried to pursue, forgetting the position of his pants. And so fell on his face.
I turned to Clarice and said, “I think this would be a good time for us to make our exit.”
From Claxton’s we went to a sedate club with an almost empty bar. There she ordered a double shot of Cordon Bleu, neat.
“What for you, Joe?” she asked.
“I don’t drink on the job.”
“Do you mind if I do?”
“Not at all.”
When the drink came she downed the libation in one swallow and made a sound like maybe a lynx might when she was satisfied with the night.
“What do you think of me, Joe?”
“I didn’t know much more than your name before tonight. But now that I’ve been around you a bit… I think you’re all right.”
“Even though I shit on my man?”
“Some men like that, I hear.”
She laughed and said, “He’s not one of them.”
