Free Selling Out by Amber Lin Page B

era of timelessness to her; she was
ancient with smooth, pale skin, not a wrinkle or age spot to give her away.
Still, no one would mistake her intensity; even the boys straightened under her
hawk-like gaze.
    “What you want?” she asked them.
    “Uh…” They hemmed and shuffled, clearly reluctant to reveal
any lascivious intentions to a woman who could have been their friend’s mom,
but too polite—and horny—to leave now.
    “You want massage? Why you come here if you don’t want
massage?”
    “We do, we do.”
    The quieter one stepped forward, not willing to lose his
shot at a happy ending over his dumbfounded friend.
    “We just were wondering… I mean, when you say massage…
Because we heard…”
    Jade glared at them, her irritation almost palpable. This
place was full-service, but everyone knew not to talk about options or anything
sexual outside the room. It was part of the way they protected themselves from
narcs, but it was obvious these two boneheads weren’t undercover; they were
just stupid.
    “Massage only,” she said flatly. “Very relaxing. You like.
No refunds.”
    Flustered, they dug around in their pockets to come up with
the right amount, thirty-minute sessions for each of them. Watching their reluctance
as they handed over the cash, I wondered if they had even kept any back to pay
for extras. And yeah, they’d be shitty tippers.
    After Jade led them to the back, she motioned me upstairs
into her office, which was arranged more like a regular sitting room. Out of
courtesy, I accepted her offer of a drink and received a very small glass of
flat soda. Here, alone, her accent dwindled to a lilt, her tone still sharp but
less abrasive.
    “So, you in trouble. It was going to happen. Just matter of
time with that one.”
    “With…” Henri?
    “You know Jenny? Pretty girl. Stoner.”
    The girl at the party, the one we’d left behind in the hotel
room. The reporter had made no mention of a dead hooker, which was certainly
newsworthy if only for the salacious appeal. She had probably bailed shortly
after we did, I assured myself. “Is she okay?” I asked.
    Jade snorted. “How should I know? Maybe, maybe not. Henri
knows it was you, and she makes him money, so why would he hurt her?”
    “Great,” I said faintly.
    “She start maybe three years before you.”
    “Jenny? I guess. She was pretty far in when I started, but
she isn’t the type to pull rank.”
    She seemed not to hear me. “Her mother was a nurse, gone
during the day. Jenny started getting high, so her mom kicked her out. Tough
love, they say. Jenny quit school and moved in with her boyfriend. A common
story.”
    “Mmm-hmm.” It was a common story. The kind that made Jade’s
business possible. So I wasn’t sure why Jade was telling me this, but
conversations with her were often circuitous. Once she had talked for fifteen
minutes about her kidney stones before segueing into telling me about
Marguerite and the women’s shelter she ran, concluding they were both a pain in
her side. At least this seemed more relevant.
    Jade flipped through a Vogue magazine and pulled out a yellowed newspaper clipping. She slid it across the
glass coffee table toward me. It appeared to be a small inner-page article
titled “Dead End in Drug-Related Shooting.” The piece explained that a
twenty-three-year-old male had been found shot dead in his apartment. Due to
his previous history of dealing charges and the circumstances of the break-in,
police assumed the hit was drug related. Rumors indicated that the victim had
poached the territory of a well-known dealer in the city, Henri Denikin, but
there was insufficient evidence to link him to the shooting. A chill ran
through me.
    The last paragraph remarked that the only possible witness,
the victim’s seventeen-year-old live-in girlfriend, had been missing since the
shooting. Her name was Jennifer Ponds. There was a grainy black-and-white
photograph of a girl who looked about nine years old,