If they’d disconnected the telephone line in my apartment just two hours earlier, I’d never have picked up the phone to Harry Brinkley. Which goes to show how unlucky some people are.

The phone line was the one thing in my apartment that still worked – including me – and when it rang I picked it up out of habit, not expectation.

“Jake – ” The voice at the other end of the line was muffled by tension, but I instantly recognised it belonged to that scumbag Harry Brinkley.

He must have sensed I was already half-way to replacing the receiver, because his next words were pleading: “Don’t hang up. I beg you.”

Only the dose of panic in his voice drew the receiver back to my ear. I wanted to hear more of it.

Brinkley again: “I’m in trouble, Jake. Capital ‘T’. You’re the only person I can turn to.”

I grunted.

“I’m being blackmailed,” he said. I could have listened to the fear in his voice all day. “Please. I can’t explain over the phone. Will you come over? You know my place.”

I counted ten seconds before his voice trembled again. “Please?” and then: ‘I’ll pay. Big.”

I hung up. I sat with the phone on my lap. Harry Brinkley didn’t deserve help, but I looked around my bare apartment, with its threadbare rug and the corner creeping with mould, I scratched my two-day-old stubble and rose and went over to the basin and stared at myself in the mirror.

He said he’d pay. Big.

So I looked out a semi-decent shirt, and pants that still had a crease. I lifted my jacket off a nail on the back of the front door. I fished around in its pockets for my car keys before remembering the repo man had asked for them when he took the car.

***

With only a hundred bucks left in my wallet, I chose to skip the taxi and walk to Brinkley’s. His place was part of a secluded estate up in the hills, and sweat was running down my spine by the time security had escorted me through double-swing gates and up the drive to his mansion. As soon as I was inside I was frisked – Brinkley never took chances – and shown into a room the size of a basketball court. In the far corner Brinkley rose to his feet behind an oak desk. He was balder and fatter now, but I was sure he was still the most treacherous son of a bitch west of the Appalachians.

“How’s it going, Jake?” he shouted.

When I made no move towards him, Brinkley’s arm, which had been outstretched for a handshake, turned into a gesture motioning me towards a chair nearer his desk. We sat.

Brinkley cleared his throat. “Thanks for coming.”

“What’s so important, Brinkley, that couldn’t have waited another twenty years?”

“I needed to see you.”

“Could it be to apologise for not inviting me to your wife’s funeral? I was close to her once. I had to read about it in the papers.”

Brinkley shrugged his shoulders in slow motion. “I didn’t think you’d want to be there – with what happened between the three of us.”

I crossed my legs, and lit a cigarette. “You’re wrong. I’d have come, and I’d have brought along a stake to drive through her heart and make damn sure she was dead.”

Brinkley scratched his nose. “Please, Jake. It was a long time ago. Right now I have something to show you, and I ask for your discretion.”

He picked up a remote from his desk and aimed it at the wall to my left. A projector screen came to life, displaying about twenty square feet of white noise.

“This isn’t pleasant viewing, I warn you.”

The screen darkened to display a date in crisp, white lettering: 25 November 2005. Then a scene presented itself: an untidy room containing an unmade bed. A man and a woman to one side of it, both facing the camera. The man: older and paler and overweight, wearing only tight, white briefs and a crude face mask. The woman: younger, toned physique. Blindfolded. Her hair was in a ponytail and she wore tight jeans. A cropped t-shirt exposed a tiny inkwell of a bellybutton. Her hands were out of shot behind her back; from her stance I deduced she was restrained in some way. The couple did not move for several seconds, perhaps to allow time for the viewer to read and digest the text across the front of the girl's t-shirt: Brinkley Real Estate & Development Inc.

“I’ll say one thing. Your advertising’s improved,” I said.

Brinkley paused the video. “Please.”

He tapped the remote again and the action began. The man adjusted himself inside his briefs before easing them down. As he stepped out of them, the eye was drawn to his swelling, swaying erection. He turned to the girl and unbuttoned her jeans, pushing them down to her ankles. He tugged her ponytail: her head jerked. Keeping it in a tight grip he dragged her to the edge of the bed and shoved her onto the mattress, face first. It was now obvious that her wrists had indeed been tied; her arms formed a stark ‘V’ shape behind her back. Her jeans were pulled off. Underneath she was wearing skimpy, gray underwear. This didn’t last long; the man yanked it to one side so roughly I’m sure I heard the rip. The man glanced at the camera to ensure they were both in shot, before licking his hand and rubbing it over the end of his cock. Readied like that, he joined the girl on the bed and, accompanied by a loud squeak of the mattress, he positioned himself behind her.

I glanced at Brinkley. His head was down and, in a puritan pose, he had covered his eyes with his arm.

Back on the screen, the girl made a bleating, pleading noise, so the man covered her mouth with one hand. With his other he tapped the inside of each of her thighs to prompt her to rise to her knees and open her legs. The man steadied himself, gripping the woman’s hip nearest the camera and he entered her so suddenly it made me flinch; his weighty body smacked against the back of her thighs. The girl hissed and the fingers of her cuffed hands clawed the air. The man built up an ugly, workmanlike rhythm. His cock – dark and silvered – entered her enthusiastically, causing the girl’s t-shirt to ride up underneath her tethered arms and gather at her shoulders. Her head was half-buried in the sheets, facing the camera. Each thrust of the man’s cock dislodged her blindfold a little more, and an uneasy nut of recognition began to form inside me.

The man laboured into her again and again, the girl moaned or wept; I couldn’t tell. Finally the man reared, pulled his cock out and, with some deliberation, aimed it at the girl’s ass.

It was uncomfortable to watch. Brinkley, still shading his eyes, fumbled across his desk in search of the remote. The button he pressed muted the man’s climactic roar at its peak.

The movie’s concluding frames unfolded in an artificial silence. I watched the man’s soundless orgasm deposit a thousand pearly teardrops in the small of the woman's back. He retreated from her spiritless body, her limbs tangled between the sheets like kindling. The man waddled towards the camera. He bent and peered an out-of-focus, masked face into its lens for a final check. The screen faded to black.

Brinkley and I sat for a few moments.

“Well,” I said finally, “Maybe run it past the lawyers before submitting it for the Super Bowl.”

“I shouldn’t have called you,” Brinkley said. He tossed the remote onto the desk and it spun off onto the floor with a clack. He placed his head in his hands. “You don’t get it, do you? That’s my daughter in that video. It’s Marli.”

I swallowed, and shifted in my chair. “So you’ve found your daughter’s sex tape. She’s an adult. What’s this got to do with me?”

“I didn’t find the video. It was recorded a week ago today and arrived at my door yesterday. It came with a note, which indicates my daughter’s been kidnapped.” Brinkley slid a scrap of paper across the desk.

I picked it up. A childlike hand had written:

Half a million bucks or the harder she gets next time.

I pushed the paper back.

“Do you agree?” Brinkley said.

I shrugged. “Not much to go on, but you can rule out English professors from the suspect list.”

“No laughing matter, Jake. I need to find out who's behind it. Get Marli safe. But goddammit, make sure the perpetrators regret this. If they go public, the press would have a field day.”

“I’m out of that game, Brinkley.”

“You were the best, Jake. The one I could rely on. Five grand. I only need you to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Nothing too heavy.”

“You never could negotiate, Brinkley.”

“Ten.”

I tried to cover up my hesitation by pulling my last cigarette out of my packet and lighting it. But maybe it was obvious I was thinking about debts and mould on apartment walls and repossessed cars.

“Fifteen. Final offer.”

“Fifteen grand? What’s the twist, you sonofabitch?”

Brinkley reddened. “No catch, Jake. Trust me.”

“I’ve made that mistake before, Brinkley.”

“Twenty years ago, you could have made life difficult for me. You didn’t.”

“Still time.”

Brinkley rolled a pencil on his desk and there was a library silence in the room until he said: “I know. But you wouldn’t be here if times weren’t tough for you, Jake. I thought we could do each other one last favour.”

I stubbed what was left of the cigarette into a plant pot and blew smoke into the air. “How long has she been gone? I take it you’ve filed a missing person’s?”

It was Brinkley’s turn to hesitate. “I don’t want the police involved. No-one must know.”

“So how long has she been gone?”

Brinkley looked away. “Five, six months,” he said. “That’s the thing. She walked out. Never told me where she went.”

I’ve got a good nose, and I could smell something in the air. It stank like fish.

***

I’m not saying I’m trustworthy, but I won’t lie about Harry Brinkley. I never liked him. But at one time we got on.  

I knew of him back in college, though our backgrounds meant we didn’t cross paths often. My parents were deadbeats. (My mom, on hitchhike visits to my dad in jail, liked to say we put the ‘us’ in ‘lousy’.) I was in gang trouble as a teenager, and that reputation stuck. Brinkley’s family was bloated with wealth from a chain of eateries and nightclubs. But there was already a scandalous patina over the Brinkley name: a story went round that when the health board closed down one of his old man’s restaurants, they found a heap of cat bones in the basement.

Brinkley wanted to branch out, and he went into property. He got lucky: he bought land when prices were on their ass. But he also ran into competition, sometimes from characters who buried more than cat bones. Brinkley was bullied out of deals, and that made him angry and that’s where I came in. 

Brinkley had heard I’d dropped out – a charge of aggravated assault that I weaselled out of – and suggested a deal; a five per cent cut if I took over negotiations. I had what Brinkley called a menu of talents – equally willing to twist subclauses with lawyers, to deliver threats to stallers on planning applications, or, subject to Brinkley’s say-so, to resort to what he coyly called ‘stiffer sanctions’. That happened rarely, but I could point out two high-rises within a mile of here whose foundations are enhanced by the worldly remains of those who tried to embezzle Brinkley Real Estate & Development.

Our partnership worked: within two years we were the hottest thing in property, not to be messed with. Journalists craved interviews, politicians wanted payoffs, lobbyists squealed for deals, lawyers and PR men hovered in hallways. Brinkley, his wealth and vanity unbridled, brought them all together at parties at his place on the first of each month.

That’s where I met Jane. Before she was a Brinkley. I’d escaped to grab a beer from the fridge in his kitchen and she was sitting on the counter, like a present under a Christmas tree.

Jane was beautiful, even under the kitchen’s strip lighting. She was lightly tanned, her hair in a bob and so black it might have been mined. Her eyes were the sort of deep brown that reflected light like stars. She wore a scarlet dress so low-cut you could start counting her ribs. I looked at her the way you sometimes look at an apple or an orange and wonder how nature can produce something impossible to improve on.

“Jake Calloway, right?” she said. Her voice was low and syrupy and softened by a couple of cocktails.

“Hello,” I said, cracking open a bottle. “Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.”

“I’ll say,” she said, and then a dimpled smile. “Are your ears burning? All the talk in there is about you. You’re the guy who gets things done. Everyone’s scared of you. Apart from me. I’ve had two martinis, so I want to hear more.”

There were pretty girls at these parties. Some, I have no doubt, that Brinkley's ego paid to be there. But Jane asked sharp questions about the business and my background, and whatever line of baloney I fed her, she listened. She wasn’t full of herself. Behind the veneer, she promised me, she was filled to the plimsoll line with defects and insecurities.

“List one,” I said.

“I’ll give you two.” She moved close. “I’m nakedly ambitious and I’m pig-headed as all hell.”

“I can’t believe you.” 

“It’s true.” She inched closer and placed her hand on mine, an endearing mannerism she would repeat many times in the future. She lowered her voice to a whisper: “You know, I once went with a guy for eight months only because a roommate I hated said we’d only last three.” 

I whistled. “How about the ambitious part?”

Her mouth was next to my ear. Her words tickled me: “How about this: I’m considering sleeping with you. Is that ambitious enough?”

***

That first night with Jane didn't feel like the start of something; more the end of everything that had gone before.

We went back to my place. She held my hand in the car so I drove one-handed. She pretended to read my palm, telling me that I was on the cusp of a life-changing event. I liked her fingertips.

My apartment was big – I had too much money then; too little taste. But she touched every table and light fitting she passed with a proprietorial reverence. She seemed to like it.

We kissed after coffee, at the door of the TV room. Some kiss: she tasted of marijuana and gin and olives and her tongue was cold and delicious. My hand entered her dress, just below the neckline, and circled downwards until, at the apex of her breast, my fingertips caught her nipple, hard as flagstone. Jane breathed into my mouth and looped encouraging fingers around my wrist. I teased that nipple as we kissed, rubbing it and lightly pulling on it. As I did, I the strap of the dress brushed off her shoulder and that beautiful breast was exposed.

Jane pushed me back, working my tie off, and we trailed discarded clothes as we stumbled through the apartment. We fell onto my bed in our underwear.

I hadn’t bothered with curtains in the bedroom, so the moonlight streaming through the windows divided our bodies into stripes of light and dark. 

She brought my hand to her, inviting my fingertips under the lip of her panties. They were drawn in further by Jane’s grinding hips until I was fingering her and she was breathing hot in my ear. At the same time, she freed my cock from my briefs, and her hand nursed it back and forth. I don’t know how I got from that crazy position – me caressing her dark pussy, and her slick stroking – to fucking her; but it fell naturally. We were touching, then fucking, that easy. She enveloped me with a heat that at once reduced the world to the dimensions of our bed. For some minutes, all that mattered was her feline presence above me, at the side of me, kissing me, teasing me, balancing on my cock, whispering.

Relationship eggheads say that making love is like the joining of two souls, but with Jane it was more. That first night set a tone that never changed. Her body was not just attached to mine, but within it. She knew how I’d respond to the tropical moistness of her kisses wherever they landed, already knew where to caress me, knew how to walk that line between teasing and demanding.

I recall the heat of that night through the image of Jane’s glistening body; tensing muscles in her back reflecting light from a million sparkling pores. She was a thoroughbred; all sinews and soft tissue; slim and long-legged and narrow-hipped, with breasts like globes.

I was on top of her at some point: I recall the sensation of her legs slackening and drawing apart underneath me, willing me deeper. I shut my eyes to open my other senses to her: the touch of her skin, her smell, the sounds we made: the brutal squelch of our fucking and the uncontrolled gasps that burst from her.

When I was close she knew that too; she would always know. She drew her legs up my sides and worked her mouth past my neck and over my chest to my nipple. Capturing it between her teeth, she tilted her head and twisted and licked and bit all at once. I do not know whether it was that, or simply her hot breath on my wet skin that made me cum in helpless squirts inside her. 

Afterwards we lay sweating across my bed, Jane still laughing about the noises; promising me it was unusual. I felt more of a man at that moment than I’d ever done while working the big act for Brinkley. That had to end. I was almost asleep when she whispered: “Jake Calloway. The rumours are true. You do get things done.”

She had gone when I awoke. I felt an acute absence until there was a knock on the door and she was back, weighted down by a suitcase and a Yucca plant. The speed that our relationship developed left me happily dazed. Even months afterwards, when I picked up the mail and saw envelopes addressed to both of us, they appeared alien things, references to a world I had trouble believing I was part of.

It wasn’t only in bed that Jane worked her way inside me. She had a childlike inquisitiveness that drew emotions out of you. She used a hundred tiny methods of affection – the touch-my-hand-while-speaking trick, or cupping the nape of my neck to draw me closer when she kissed hello.

She did that at breakfast one morning, just before she mentioned she was looking to leave her PR firm. What did I think of her chances with Brinkley Inc?

I said I’d speak to Brinkley. Brinkley was doubtful, mistrustful of my suggestions but, like a lot of people, he could never say no to me. He agreed to have her on trial. After a day, he was sold.

“She’s a natural, Jake,” he trilled. “I don’t know where the hell you found her, but go back and dig up her twin sister.” Even I had no idea she’d be so good. A place over in Willow Creek we hadn’t shifted for months; she sold on her third day for more than the asking price. She was tenacious and efficient and Brinkley soon asked her to handle the simpler negotiations for me so I could focus on bigger deals out of town that Brinkley was struggling with. It didn’t change anything. The less I saw of Jane, the more raw my excitement at seeing her again. Her kisses retained their effect; when she came back flushed with excitement – another sale – I craved her as hard as ever.

It was the most dangerous kind of love: the generous sort. The night she told me Brinkley had made her a full partner, we drank champagne in bed.

“It means working more alongside him,” she said. “Maybe taking on more of your clients.”

I clinked her glass and said that was fine. We didn’t have sex that night; she was too excited. But that was okay; over the months we were together Jane helped me understand that relationships matured.

***

Jane was still keen to attend the monthly parties. Our ritual, she called it. One night we were returning home from Brinkley’s when I pulled up at the lights downtown. Jane had hardly spoken.

“I hardly saw you tonight, honey,” I said. “You disappeared –”

Jane said, “Jake.”

I turned. She was pale as a harvest moon.

“I have something I need to tell you.”

“What’s up?’

She looked down and sighed. “Jake. Jake. Oh, Jake.” A man wheeled a bicycle across the crosswalk in front of us. She watched him.

She said, “I’m pregnant.”

The lights turned green and I couldn’t press the gas. The car behind beeped. I put my turn signals on and gripped the steering wheel and after a moment I whooped.

“Jesus. I’m going to be a dad. Can you believe it?” I was laughing. “Boy, you had me worried – you looked so pale. I’m going to be a dad!”

The car behind beeped again.

Jane's eyes were watering. She shook her head. “You don’t understand, Jake.”

“Understand what?”

A longer beep from behind.

“It isn't yours.”

***

In my job I’d delivered plenty blows on Brinkley’s behalf, but I’d rarely ridden the punches myself, and never twice in succession: to have the girl you loved cheat on you, and then to find out who she cheated with.

She wouldn’t tell me, too loyal to the sap. That night, as she cleared my place of everything that had made it a home, she was snivelling about how she’d always warned me what she was like.

I didn’t ask who the father was. I played with my suspicions all night and by dawn I was still sober enough to take a call from Brinkley’s office number. It wasn’t Brinkley on the line, but Sam Snaith, his weaselly lawyer, checking I was home. I was to receive important documents.

The slots were lining up.

While Snaith was on the phone, two huge guys turned up at the door with a sheaf of papers. Thinking back, maybe it was just one guy; I was seeing a lot of things double by then. Dissolution of partnership documents, handed to me sheet by sheet; forms and disclaimers that staggered in front of my eyes. The guys stayed until I’d filled every box I could see with ‘x’s.

I got money in return. A fraction of what it should have cost Brinkley, but it meant that for a few years I had enough to stay drunk. The rest I wasted.

Soon after, I got into the car aiming to settle things between the three of us. I woke up in a rest stop four hours later drooling into the barrel of a rifle. I was too drunk, too much of a lousy deadbeat to do a damn thing right. The only thing that kept me going was a hope for payback. It didn’t happen: months later I heard that Jane, as nakedly ambitious or as pig-headed as she’d promised, had married Brinkley. Months blurred into years, blurred into decades while I waited for any crumb of good luck. I got it six months ago: an entry in the obits section of the local Herald-Picayune: in the loving arms of Harry, her husband of twenty years, Jane Brinkley had died after a long illness. I only hoped it had been painful, too, but that didn't make me happier.

***

Finding people isn’t much harder than getting rid of them. But the logistics are reversed. I took away Marli’s bank statements and final warning notices that had continued to pile up at Brinkey’s place. By studying her outgoings, I triangulated her movements up to the date of the last statement. I spent a few hours showing photos to bartenders and concierges and soon I had an apartment address where a girl called Marli, matching her description had lived.

It had only taken me two days to get this far, and that was something I wasn’t happy about.

***

I rang the apartment’s buzzer as a polite prelude to a break-in. The place might have further clues to Marli’s whereabouts.

Almost instantly there was a noise from within. It was occupied. The latch twitched and half a second later a beautiful young woman, wearing a long t-shirt and little else, opened the door. There was no doubt it was Marli even if I hadn't seen a photo: the genetic traits were too obvious: coal-black hair as straight as a highway, a glowing complexion, the same chocolate eyes. I stared glassily at her before pushing past her into her apartment.

“Who the hell are you?” Marli said, hand still on the latch. “And what the fuck are you doing in my home?”

“The who is Jake Calloway. The what the fuck am I doing is working for your father.”

I glanced around. It was a tiny place –more of a studio. I recognised the bed as the one the guy had fucked her in in the video. There was a kitchen stove in one corner, a hanger in the other, between them clothes emptied across the floor. The place needed a few windows opening.

There were no chairs, so I sat on the edge of the bed. “I thought your daddy might have fixed you up somewhere better.”

Marli didn’t speak. 

I could take her in more calmly now. It was impossible how much like her mother she was. Like going back in time. There was nothing of Brinkley in her appearance; as far as looks went, she’d won that coin toss.

“Two days ago your father received a package in the post, asking for money. Plus a naughty video that looks like it was filmed in this bed,” I said, tapping the mattress.

Marli flushed.

“So am I looking at a kidnap victim here? Or am I looking at someone who filmed a porno to extort money from her dad? Who’s screwing with me here? You or papa?”

“I… it wasn’t a porn –” she began.

“I’ve got time,” I said.

Marli sighed. “It wasn’t my idea. It was Gino’s.”

“Start at the beginning. With Gino.”

Marli played with her hair and began talking. “Dad’s probably told you I left home six months ago. Did he tell you he cut my allowance? The richest guy in the state and he lets me starve. Can you believe that?”

“Easily,” I said.

“There’s a guy down the hall. Gino, some sort of film guy from Italy. He’s kinda mean looking, but he has lots of equipment.”

“I can believe that too. Go on.”

“I’d borrowed money from him and he said if my daddy’s rich and doesn’t give me money, why don’t I make him? Gino said just make it look like I was in trouble. Dad would pay up.”

I gave a short laugh. “Your boyfriend never met your father did he?”

“He’s not my boyfriend. And that’s what I told him. But Gino said everyone knew my dad was looking to stand for Senate, so if we filmed a sex scene, he’d want to keep it quiet.”

“He does. This Gino: he act alone? He write the ransom note?”

Marli nodded. “Yeah. His English isn’t great. Took two drafts. But I thought it was – ”

“ – more realistic?”

She nodded again.

“What was in this for Gino?”

“You saw what was in it for Gino.” She fixed me with a level gaze, not embarrassed, while edging towards me. “I suppose you think I’m dumb. But it wasn’t totally a bad idea.”

“I've seen better ones written in crayon on the back of an envelope.”

Marli sat by me, cross-legged on the floor. “It could still work, even.” She smiled up at me. It was a beautiful smile, and in that moment I knew Marli Brinkley’s sort. That glowing skin of hers was summers spent on Long Island. Self-confidence sharpened to a tip by ten years in private school. And that smile – striking as a picket fence in the moonlight – was honed on Aspen ski vacations. Pretty, but poisonous.

Marli rose to her knees and placed the tip of her forefinger on my leg. She bit her bottom lip, looked at me with an expression she must have practised –  a variation of the fawn-in-a-gunsight look – and ran her finger up the inside of my thigh.

Her voice softened: “Did you enjoy watching me and Gino?”

“Marli.”

She smiled that smile. “You did. You’re probably thinking about it right now, aren’t you?”

Jesus. “Marli, stop –”

“What I’m trying to say –’ her finger reached my groin “– is that there’s no need to tell my dad where I am. Maybe, maybe, we could reach some sort of –”

I swallowed. “Arrangement?”

By way of answer, Marli Brinkley pressed a self-assured palm between my legs, cupping me in my pants. When I didn’t stop her, she fiddled with the zipper until she’d worked it down. She held my gaze, looking for my reaction, until the moment she extracted my cock; then it had her focus: she assessed it at close range as it grew in her fist. She delicately removed two pubes plastered to its shining head before kissing it. Her gaze drifted up again. “Deal?”

“It won’t work, Marli,” I said. It was a half-hearted answer and she knew it.

“It’ll work. Because you won’t tell on me.” Marli shrouded the head of my cock with her lips. Her cheeks hollowed as her head rocked up and down, each forward movement enveloping more of my shaft. Long Island, Aspen, private school: who knows where she learned to suck like that.

“You didn’t explain,” I gasped. “why you left home.”

Her mouth’s momentum slowed and then it popped off my cock. A sheen of saliva on her chin gave it plastic quality. “Because I hate him, Jake. He’s the meanest, greediest man I know. He lied about Mom, just so it wouldn’t affect his bid for office.”

“What do you mean?”

Marli started jerking me now that her mouth was otherwise employed. She knew how to keep an engine running while it was idle: the biceps of her arm tightened into a knot. “That stuff in the papers when Mom died. It was all shit.” 

She returned her mouth to my cock, but I slid back on the bed. “What was shit?”

Marli wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took a deep breath. “My mom killed herself. There was no long illness, or if there was it was the goddamn long-term misery of living with my father. Mom told me she should never have married my dad; that she’d always loved someone else.”

My erection disappeared. I zipped up. “She said that?”

Marli nodded, then screwed her face up in a question. “Why does it matter to you?”

“I suppose it tidies up some loose ends.” After a long pause, I added: “So how did your dad fix her obituary?”

Marli sighed and stood. Now she looked down at me the way a teacher might look at a pupil who wouldn’t stop asking dumb questions. “Because he owns half the papers in the state – and has shares in the rest. He tells them what to write all the time.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. If he’s bought the papers, who's going to spill the beans about his daughter’s porno?”

“It wasn’t a porno,” Marli said. “But I dunno. If it wasn’t important, why send you?”

“Why send me,” I repeated. “That’s what’s been itching me. Why call me up after twenty years? It makes no sense, unless – (got a cigarette, Marli? never mind) – unless this isn’t about you. It’s about me. Brinkley can silence the tabloids about a dirty video, but some stories are too big. If he’s running for Senate, and someone – say his ex-partner, decides now is the time for payback and seeks immunity in return for evidence that Brinkley ordered a couple of hits. He can’t silence the press then. That’s what he’s scared of. Then just as he’s beginning to sweat, a videotape appears on his doorstep – and pieces of a jigsaw begin to fit.”

“Wait, my dad had people killed? And you’re not his partner anymore?”

I held my hand up. “That would only work if Gino’s in on it. Maybe he isn’t, but he will be. Everyone has a price, Marli. Your mom did. Me too. Now all it takes is a word in Gino’s ear that someone is coming round to fix him good, and I’ll wager your boyfriend is sitting with a Smith and Wesson 38 on his lap, waiting for me to walk into a bullet. Neat and tidy. No loose ends: I can’t talk, Gino won’t incriminate himself. Brinkley’s problems would be over.”

Marli pushed a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed it for a second. “This is too complicated. But, boy, even for all the money you get, it must be kind of stressful doing what you do. I bet you some days you need to relax.”

Still standing in front of me, still looking down at me, she edged her t-shirt above her hips and exposed in turn her panties, her flat belly, her bra. She pulled the t-shirt over her head and dropped it to the floor. She unclasped her bra and freed her pale, upturned breasts, capped with nipples like rivets.

“Marli, what’s going on?

Marli snagged her thumbs into the waistband of her panties. She looked at me as she zig-zagged them down her long, tanned legs, kicking them off with a flourish. Her pussy was bare: a pale, inverted pyramid, divided by a dark slit.

“You’ve seen most of it before anyway, and it made you hard. Didn’t it?” 

I tried not to stare. “Get dressed. You shouldn’t –  shouldn’t – do this.”

“Shouldn’t, shouldn’t. Just did.” She leaned down and her nose touched mine. In a movement that took me back two decades, she cradled the nape of my neck in her hand and brought my mouth closer, She kissed me, her tongue trickling along the edge of my teeth before pushing in. At the same time she ran a splayed hand over my shirt, across my chest, rubbing through the material until she had found my nipple, teasing it with a featherlight touch until it had risen to a nub under her control. She touched me the same way Jane had, all those years ago.

“Lie back,” Marli said, pushing my shoulders.

I could have resisted. But it was too tempting to imagine it was Marli’s mother levering me down, working the rest of my clothes off; opening my shirt and pulling it off my shoulders. It could have been Jane unbuttoning my jeans with a twist of her fingers, peeling each side open with a coroner’s care before clawing my briefs until they were below my balls, and taking me once more in her mouth, testing the length of me, then lapping in carefree licks that chased my lolling cock around.

“Don't move,” Marli said. I blinked my eyes open. She climbed onto the bed, straddling me, edging herself up the outside my thighs until my cock lay rigid against the length of her slit. As if she was navigating a bump, Marli lifted and lowered herself and I was inside her. 

She rode me like that, quite gently, her hips moved up and down sliding on my length while she leaned over me. She planted her elbows either side of my ears, her breasts hot against my chest. Her eyes met mine. I looked away – then looked back.

I bit her shoulder when it came in range of my mouth. I licked her arm and her armpit. While still fucking her I twisted her onto her back and the movement splayed her legs. I drew myself out of her driven by a desire to taste, to press my tongue to her slit, to greedily swallow its oily slickness. Marli rewarded me with grieving sobs as the tip of my tongue played on her, and unfolded and refolded her lips.

She pivoted now and turned on her belly, then rose on her knees to adopt the same position she’d been in for Gino. Her back arched to present her ass to me. It was pale as ice-cream and bisected by a dark, spreading cleft.

“Fuck me like this,” she whispered into the pillow. “Like an animal.”

I entered her again and felt the wet, tight heat around my cock.

In a tiny voice she said, “Smack me while you fuck me. I want it rough.”

I grabbed one cheek, clawing at its doughlike tension. The testing smack I gave it with the pads of my fingers made no noise and brought no response from Marli. I smacked her again, with the palm of my hand, once, twice, harder, louder. This time her ass cheek quivered as I struck it, her body recoiled and she gave a close-mouthed sigh that could have meant anything. I spanked one cheek, fascinated by its tight, rubbery response to my hand, until it was a paisley patchwork of red and white, then switched to the other, stinging its paleness with heavy slaps in time to my thrusts. 

“That –” Marli gasped between smacks, each word emerging in isolation, “That – makes – you –  fucking – hard – doesn’t – it?” The smacks were so loud now, I was sure Gino would overhear.

I kept fucking her, kept slapping her until my hand stung. I was impossibly hard and she was so crazily wet that my cock slipped out of her and up the crack of her ass to hit my own finger. I was not in control. I was unmoored; neither in the present nor the past, neither joyful nor sad, but a mix: the floating pleasure of each thrust weighted by nostalgia; a feeling not unlike the complicated sensation when discovering a treasured childhood toy.

But if Jane and Marli looked the same and fucked the same way, Marli was a step up in the filthiness department. She turned her flushed face to me and whispered, “Wet your finger. Stick it in my asshole.”

Her asshole: a dark button next to my thumb. I stopped spanking her and put my finger to my mouth and brought it down, rubbed it around her hole in shrinking concentric circles that made Marli twitch. I worked my finger in, twisting, squeezing up to the knuckle and then a little further until she gasped.

I pushed my finger and my cock in in unison, harder and deeper and Marli breathed a slow, fuck into the pillow. I knew I would cum, but I fought against it: every moment closer – every thrust, every twist of my finger, meant this dream was nearing the end. Through my finger and through my cock I heard Marli tensing and a suppressed wail into the pillows, then the absence of breathing and that was enough. I came inside her, and she took it all. 

***

We did not lie together long. Marli soon scooted off the bed and went over to the washbasin. She moved like a model; the crack of her ass remained vertical, while her cheeks, carrying the livid evidence of her spanking, were further disfigured by sparkling smears of sweat or cum. The inside of her thighs glistened obscenely. She looked gorgeous. 

She leaned over the basin and peered into the mirror. She knew I was watching; she wasn’t bashful. She pulled a tube of lipstick off the ledge and applied it to her lips with precision for a whole minute. Then she smacked her lips and studied me through the mirror. “So I won’t get a nickel from Dad.”

“I did warn you,” I said.

She returned to perch on the edge of the bed, her backside touching my leg. 

“Do you have a wife, Jake? A girlfriend?”

I shook my head. I was already hardening again, enjoying her casual nakedness. It felt good to be with a woman again.

"Pity," Marli said. She was twisting the bedsheets between her fingers. “Because I was thinking: if my dad won’t pay, do you think his business partner would be easier to deal with?”

I shot her a look. “Brinkley doesn’t have a – “

Marli rolled her eyes theatrically. “Ex business partner, whatever.” She twisted to face me. “I mean, say this ex business partner, someone I’d never met, came to my apartment uninvited and – just say, because this is one way they might see  it – made me fuck him under the threat of revealing my whereabouts. Some would say that’s immoral. Maybe the cops would be interested in the way you work. Or –” her face brightened “ – imagine if my dad was sent another video. One of his ex partner, the one he’s paying to find his daughter, sticking his cock in her. Smacking her ass. Licking his finger and putting it in her dirty little asshole. Not pulling out. A video of that has got to be worth something, don’t you think? Jake?”

She saw my eyes searching the room, and pointed to a tiny box against the wall. “That’s what you’re looking for, Jake. Gino left it. A wireless security camera. Isn’t it tiny? Ever used them?”

I shook my head. 

“Gino says it’s motion-triggered; the latest thing. You don’t need to press a button. No wires. Records everything and stores it in the internet, or something, so you can’t wipe it. I’m icky on the details, but it works.”

“So all we did –”

“I mean it was hot, wasn’t it? Even if you’re old, I kind of enjoyed bits of it.  The spanking, and so on. I had to keep quiet. It must have looked raw; me on top, that fat cock of yours entering me. I mean it is big, Jake, I’ll say that for you. We had the perfect camera angle too. Right behind us. Hey. You know what I did?” Marli grinned like a schoolgirl who’d been caught smoking dope. “I kind of accidentally pulled my ass cheeks wide as you fucked, so it could capture every detail.”

“You’re some piece of work, Marli. I can see who you inherited your morals from.”

Marli froze. “That’s harsh,” she said, raising herself and affecting a pout. Then a shrug. “But true, I guess. So, anyway, Jake. Business. How much is the video worth to you?”

“A lot.”

Marli gave me that gorgeous smile.

I reached down to the floor to take my wallet from my pants. Fifty dollars left. I pulled the bills out. “I can’t spare it all though,” I said. I returned the ten dollar note and one twenty, and handed her the other twenty.

Marli looked at it. “What’s this?”

“Payment. Take the video, wrap it in a pink bow, buy some stamps and put it in the mail to your dad. Send a note to go with it. I’ll sign it. No, on second thoughts. No note. Just the video. That’s payback enough.”