Free Hard Case Crime: Songs of Innocence by Richard Aleas Page B

which surprised me by being Julie, Julie Park. I was used to strippers and sex workers using aliases to keep their personal and professional lives separate. But Julie said, “I’m not ashamed of what I do, John. I won’t say I’m proud of it—but I’m not ashamed.”
    Her doctor wasn’t there when we arrived, but they paged him and he showed up twenty minutes later. I had a longer wait. The doctor who eventually taped up my chest explained Julie’s situation to me as he circled the roll of bandages around and around and around my torso. Two fractures, only marginally knitted, had apparently broken again and one of the pins had shifted. Bones needed to be re-set and her hand re-immobilized. My doctor went on at length about metacarpals and phalanges, glad to have a captive audience.
    When I next saw her it was three hours later and her right hand was completely encased in plaster. She was lying in a hospital bed. She raised her cast in my direction. “This is me giving you the finger,” she said.
    “You probably saved my life,” I told her.
    “I didn’t do it for you. When he finished with you, he’d have started on me.”
    “Well,” I said. “Thank you anyway.”
    “How’s your chest?” she said.
    “Better than your hand,” I said.
    It hadn’t taken us long to find our way out of the tunnels, but it had felt like hours. We finally emerged in the basement of Havemeyer, the chemistry building, just a few hundred yards from Broadway. Julie had cradled her hand while I stood on 116th Street trying to wave down a taxi without raising my arm.
    And what of Jorge Ramos, the man on the receiving end of Julie’s home-run swing? His wallet gave us his name; his breathing, though uneven, told us he was alive when we left him. That’s all we knew or cared.
    “I should never have agreed to meet you,” Julie said. “Di was right.”
    “Look—”
    “Not even by phone. When she sent me your e-mail address, I should have deleted it.”
    “Ardo’s people might have come after you anyway.”
    “They were done with me,” she said.
    “Like they were done with Dorrie?”
    “You don’t know that they had anything to do with her death.”
    “No,” I said. “I also don’t know that they had anything to do with the man who chased us through the tunnels at gunpoint today, but I think it’s a reasonable guess.”
    “How’d they even know I was coming to see you? What do they have, some way to read my e-mail?”
    “I doubt it,” I said. “More likely just Jorge Ramos watching your building.”
    “Why? Why would they follow me?”
    “I don’t know, Julie. It’s got to be tied up with what happened to Dorrie. Do you have any idea why they might have gone after her? She didn’t take any customers from them, did she?”
    “How could she?” Julie said. “She never worked for them. Before I hired her she was working at Spellbound—it’s a place on 51st and Second started by this woman from Brazil, and I know Dorrie didn’t take any clients from her, because she didn’t have any when she started with me.”
    “What about when Dorrie left you?” I asked. “What did she do then?”
    “You don’t know?” Julie said. “She didn’t tell you?”
    I shook my head. She hadn’t told me about any of this. Not about the attack on Julie, nor about quitting her job out of fear of a long-fingered gunman with a sadistic streak. I couldn’t guess why, except maybe a desire not to worry me. Or maybe fear that I’d have insisted on doing something about it—which I would have.
    “She went independent,” Julie said. “Complete solo act.”
    “What does that mean?” I said.
    “Outcall only. No apartment, no spa, no fixed location. No rent to pay, no agency booking you, no phone girl. Not even a phone number. You run an ad with just an anonymous e-mail address, you answer the e-mail yourself, and if the client sounds okay you meet at his place. Or at a hotel room if that’s what he prefers. I suppose most