Free Things You Won't Say by Sarah Pekkanen Page A

didn’t get screwed by men physically or emotionally.
    “You say you’re in town for a few days on business. Maybe he wants to meet you at your hotel for a drink. You set a time for him to come by and I get to the hotel first to set up my camera and recording equipment. You meet him in the room, get him to talk about what he wants to do to you—”
    At Christie’s expression he hurriedly continued, “Just talking, no touching—then I knock on the door and call out ‘Room service.’ You tell him to sit back and relax, that you ordered champagne. Then you open the door and boom! You’re gone.”
    Christie turned the plan over in her mind. “How do you know when to knock?”
    “I listen in on the recording equipment. I’ve got a good hotel in mind; there’s a coffee shop next door. After the job we wait there. Or I wait there, because you’re done, so you can take a cab home. When the dude’s gone I gather my stuff and write up a report for wifey.”
    “Who pays for the cab?” Christie wanted to know.
    “The client,” Elroy said. “All your expenses plus sixty an hour, like we talked about. Most jobs will probably take about four hours, start to finish, including your transport time.”
    Christie drummed her nails on the linoleum table. “It sounds too easy,” she said.
    “You’d be the third girl I’ve hired for this job, and none of the others complained.”
    “Why did the other two quit?” she asked.
    “The first one moved away,” he said. “She was with me forthree years. The second one married one of the guys we’d set up when his wife divorced him.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    Elroy shook his head. “Wish I was. She was good at what she did. So, are you with me? We’ll probably work four, five jobs a week.”
    “That many?” Christie asked. Five jobs a week, at four hours per job, and sixty dollars an hour would be . . . let’s see, about . . . Well, it would be a lot of money. Plus expenses!
    “You wouldn’t believe how many more people are having affairs since Facebook,” Elroy said. “The number of folks who hook up with exes . . .”
    Christie suddenly wondered if Simon had a Facebook account. “Do you ever trace people?” she asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Like put a tracker on their car.”
    Elroy shook his head. “Nah. But I did put up an ad on Facebook. My clients have doubled since then.”
    He regarded her for a moment. “Any questions? Any moral objections we need to get out of the way?”
    “Are you kidding?” Christie shook her head. “My mother cheated on my stepfather—or make that stepfathers, plural—the whole time I was growing up. Once she and one of the guys took me to the movies. They told me they were going to sit in the back row but I should sit up front, where I could see the screen really well.” She rolled her eyes. “Like that was what they were thinking about. They just didn’t want me to see them pawing each other. I finally told my stepfather when I was twelve.”
    “What happened?” Elroy asked.
    Christie looked down at her Diet Coke and swirled her straw around a few times. She cleared her throat before answering. “He left,” she said.
    “Do you regret telling him?” Elroy asked.
    “I regret not doing it earlier,” she said. He had been thenicest of the many men who’d shared her mother’s bed. He’d bought her a harmonica once after she’d seen a guy on the street playing one and thought it sounded pretty. It was just a cheap toy, but he hadn’t given it to her until her birthday, which was weeks after they’d watched the street performer. She didn’t know what had surprised her more: that he’d remembered how much she liked the sounds the tiny instrument made, or that he’d noticed her enjoyment in the first place.
    Elroy opened his battered briefcase and pulled out a file. He withdrew a photograph and slid it toward Christie. It was of a nice-looking guy, maybe in his early forties, the sort you’d see