Free A Better Goodbye by John Schulian Page A

tag team came and went at will, and now they were back at it, having turned a two-girl operation on Beverly near CBS into a nightmare.
    Concernedcitizen was on the case. “These predators may be responsible for as many as ten attacks,” he wrote. Some of the victims apparently had gone to him instead of the police because he was a lawyer who would counsel them, not sell them out. But he made it sound like the cops sided with the girls this time: “While LE is our opponent on the issue of prostitution, LE is with us in deeming these two criminals far more dangerous than the hanky-panky of the providers. Should a well-dressed African-American gentleman show up at your door saying he works for a bank, he may have an accomplice waiting out of sight. Please do not let him in. Even call LE if he bangs on the door.”
    Scott skimmed the responses to Concernedcitizen’s post—lots of outrage and indignation from other hobbyists, nothing from any girls. But he knew that in the provider community the drums were already beating. Hookers and hand whores read Tailfeathers devoutly, pissing about clients whose reviews made them sound like sluts and moaning about girls who claimed they were twenty-two when they wouldn’t see thirty-five again. He’d heard that providers had their own website too, talking shop and rating both clients and bosses, but he’d never taken the trouble to track it down. That was more bitching than he could handle.
    He caught enough shit every day from his own girls. There were seven of them now—the number seemed to go up or down every few weeks—and he knew they were primed to freak out at the bad news Concernedcitizen had passed along. At times like this, rampant fear was as much a part of the business as eye shadow.
    When Scott had set up his first operation three years before, there had been a little accountant-looking dude who would take masseuses up on their offer of a shower and come out of the bathroom waving a gun and demanding all their money. The next year it had been a carpenter who preyed on skinny blondes, trussing them up, throwing them in the back of his van, and driving out to Palmdale to go animal on them. The carpenter wound up killing himself, although there was still talk that one of his victims’ boyfriends had pulled the trigger. As for the accountant, who knew? He had vanished into the ether that seemed to consume most of the crazies who declared open season on girls who, when you got right down to it, were all but defenseless.
    Not that the girls didn’t try to do something. Scott knew that some of them hugged first-time clients coming through the door, thinking they could feel hidden weapons. There were probably also girls who carried Mace or even a small pistol—if wide-load pro football players could pack, why not hundred-and-five-pound hand-job artists? But Scott didn’t want to think about a gun in the hands of some of the women he’d employed. Too many of them were so scary stupid that they’d wind up shooting the wrong person, and the wrong person might be him.
    Scott’s first impulse with the latest maniacs to descend on the business had been to call them the Love ’Em and Leave ’Em Bandits, but his girls didn’t laugh, they just became more skittish than ever. Now it was clear that the only way he’d be able to stop them from getting any crazier was to hire security. He’d done it before, but that didn’t mean he liked it or anything he had heard about it. There were stories of off-duty LAPD providing muscle for a girlfriend in the business, but that could have been bullshit. What your average massage operation got for security was several cuts below the knuckle draggers who worked as rent-a-cops at shopping malls and car shows. The best Scott had come across were an apartment manager’s kid brother, a recovering car salesman with a speech impediment, and a guy in one of his acting