Free A Better Goodbye by John Schulian

country who preferred to call themselves providers and hobbyists. There were masseuses in the mix as well, very few of them certified by any board of health, more and more turning tricks the way masseuses never had a decade ago, when a pretty girl could bankroll her education or her lingerie and drug habit with hand jobs. Now they joined escorts under the imagined protection of the euphemism “provider.” Scott supposed that such self-deception came into vogue after the people who ran Tailfeathers prefaced their home page by saying, “This site was created purely and solely for entertainment purposes.” Still, the announcement always made him laugh, because it was partly bullshit and partly the absolute truth. He’d always found pussy entertaining.
    Once a week or so, he would scan the L.A. escort reviews on Tailfeathers to make sure his girls weren’t in there. He’d given them specific instructions not to draw attention to themselves that way. Vice cops probably spent more time reading Tailfeathers than the perverts did. Worse, the guys who wrote the reviews—assuming it wasn’t the girls doing it themselves to drum up business—couldn’t resist exaggerating golden showers, rim jobs, and ass banging. Back when he didn’t care about reviews, Scott had checked one of his girls on Tailfeathers and saw that a guy had created a friend for her: “Sometimes one girl would fuck the other with a vibrator while simultaneously fucking me.” The girl in question was a psych major from UCLA—killer body, desperately broke—who had shown up a virgin, so naive that Scott had to have a redheaded porno washout teach her how to jerk a guy off. When the virgin quit three weeks later, the other girls still hadn’t seen her naked, much less getting creative carnally.
    No time for Scott to read reviews today, though. No time to use the links on the reviews to check out the competition, either. He still hadn’t taken a look at the scenes for his audition, and he wanted to do that before lunch. But the one thing he couldn’t ignore was the discussion board. The board in L.A. was Tailfeathers’ liveliest and busiest, hobbyists and providers exchanging sometimes surprisingly insightful notes on everything from STDs to falling in love on the job. Clients were warned when cops started busting massage operations, girls coming from out of town could line up business, and the rip-off bitches got outed.
    Scott scrolled down the page, seeing the same names he saw on posts every time he checked Tailfeathers, not noticing anything out of the ordinary until he reached the bottom: “Providers Beware: Real Criminals Resume Rampage, LE Wants to Help.” LE was shorthand for law enforcement. Everything else spelled trouble. “Shit,” Scott said, clicking on the post with no more enthusiasm that he would have had for walking on hot coals.
    The poster was a guy who called himself Concernedcitizen, a know-it-all douchebag who really did know a hell of a lot. Scott skipped the part where Concernedcitizen complained about having been called a grandstander for his previous warnings to providers. Nor did Scott want to waste his eyesight reading when Concernedcitizen got all liberal and sensitive, writing, “I’m sorry the men in question are African-American, but I have a moral obligation to report the reality as it has been reported to me.”
    â€œYeah, yeah, yeah,” Scott said. Then he arrived at the heart of the matter. These assholes had spent the last year raping and robbing massage girls all over the city, bouncing from the Westside to Los Feliz to the Valley, striking twice in a month, then crawling back under a rock until you damn near forgot about them. It wasn’t the kind of story the straight media was going to pay attention to—Christ, they didn’t have the time or space to chronicle all the murders in L.A.’s ghettos. So this unholy