Free JL02 - Night Vision by Paul Levine

“You know what French is, right?”
    I didn’t say oui, madame. I just gave her my big, dumb-guy look. It isn’t hard to do.
    “Like in the poem,” she said, “‘The French, they are a funny race. They fight with their feet and fuck with their face.’ Get it?”
    I scrunched my face into its genius-at-thought mode. “I get part of it.”
    “Part of it?”
    “I mean, fighting with their feet, I get…”
    She turned toward the back where the man was now hunched over the keyboard of the computer. “Max! C’mere.”
    A little guy, all wires and gristle in black pants, black knit shirt, and white patent-leather loafers. A tattoo of a snake showed green on a veined, browned forearm. A worm of a mustache wriggled under his nose. He squinted at me through suspicious eyes. All he needed was a switchblade to pick his teeth, and he could have been a small-time grifter in Guys and Dolls.
    “Yow, Bobbie,” he answered.
    “Whyn’t you help Mister…”
    “Lassiter,” I announced proudly.
    They traded places. Her high heels clackety-clacked as she legged it toward the back. Sleek, fine legs with a comely curve of the calf undulating with each step. As she slinked by Max he said, “Foot Long’s just about got Naughty Nurse’s panties off.”
    She sat down at the desk and peered into the monitor. “Nurse’s been putting out for everybody and their cousin,” she called back.
    Max took his time examining my application. I wondered if anyone ever failed the entrance exam. “You can listen in?” I asked.
    “Huh?”
    I pointed toward the computer where Bobbie sat, her long, lean body bent toward the screen.
    “Someone’s gotta be the sys-op,” he said. “Work the panel in case there’s a glitch online. We can tap into any talky-talk, just like Southern Bell.”
    “You must hear—or read—it all.”
    “Yow. Till after while, it puts you to sleep. Like how many ways can they describe it?”
    He returned to the form, moving his lips and tracing each line with a finger. “Say, you were just kidding here, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Bobbie don’t have much of a sense of humor. Comes from having a hard life as a kid. You gotta make allowances with a filly like that.” He grinned and showed me two rows of shopping-center dental work. “You’re a straight shooter looking for old-fashioned cooze in the missionary position, yow?”
    “Yow,” I answered right back at him.
    He gave me a temporary membership card and a book of rules. I gave him a twenty-dollar bill.
    “Ever have any trouble with your clients?” I asked.
    The word “trouble” made the mustache twitch. “Whaddaya mean?”
    “Like any women complain about guys putting the make on ‘em, they don’t like what’s being offered?”
    His eyes had put up a shield. “No trouble. Woman gets hassled, she can bug out of the call. She invites a guy over or goes out with him, that’s her business. We don’t give no guarantees.”
    “You keep records of the calls?”
    He sneaked a peek at the wall where his occupational license was taped over a crack. Probably figured me for a city inspector and wondered when I’d show him my palm.
    I pointed back to his main computer. “All the calls stored in there?”
    “Hell no! I wouldn’t clog up our hard memory with that shit.”
    “How many members you have?”
    “Three hundred fifty men. Almost two hundred women. Hey, we’re a member of the BBB.”
    “So what’s stored in there?”
    “It’s programmed to record how many times members call in and how long they talk. After fifty hours, you gotta renew.”
    “So it records who they talk to…”
    “That’d be an invasion of privacy,” he said with undue formality.
    “But it could be done, if you wanted to know who a client spoke with, say, two nights ago?”
    “The calls are coded numerically. It could be—”
    “What the hell!” Bobbie Blinderman demanded, towering over Max the Jockey. “Just who the hell are you, buster?” In her bare feet