Trailer Park Noir

Sixteen

He found the Carey residence. It was off Happy Valley Road, on the opposite side of the road from him, at the end of a long driveway, like so many houses on that road. They appeared to live in a pleasant-looking, medium-size, ranch-style house with a green yard and lots of trees shading the house. He found a turnout a couple hundred yards up the road and made a U-turn into it, parked, and waited.

It was six-twenty. He would not have the cover of night for another three hours, so he had to hope she didn’t notice him parked down here when she left.

Carey had said she drove a white Hyundai. Reznick saw it parked in the open two-car garage at the end of the driveway. Parked in the other side was a dark pickup truck.

He waited and watched. He turned on the radio and listened to talk radio for a few minutes before it started to give him a headache. There were no jazz stations in the Redding area, but there was a “smooth jazz” station – the elevator music of jazz. He found that on FM. Couldn’t take that for very long, either. Instead of putting in a CD, he chose to wait in silence. Hot, miserable silence.

He’d changed into a blue T-shirt and a pair of denim cutoffs, sneakers on his sockless feet.

He rolled down all the windows and even the hot breeze felt cool against his sweaty neck. The driveway that led to the Carey house was flanked by a field full of green shrubbery. Farther out, the shrubbery leveled out, and he saw some cows lazily grazing on the weeds and grass.

At twelve minutes before seven he heard voices. No words, just a female voice, then a male voice. Then a car door slammed and an engine started up.

Reznick wondered if that was his mark. Sure enough, several seconds later, a white Hyundai – it was a white car, he assumed it was a Hyundai because he knew that was the kind of car she drove, but he wouldn’t have known a Hyundai from a Roman chariot – bounced and bobbed over the rough driveway on its way out.

Reznick started his car. The white car turned right and headed for Anderson. It was a long straight stretch for a while, and she had a perfect view of him behind her. He waited, hoping to be less conspicuous.

Finally, he pulled out of the turnout and headed after Alicia Carey.

Steven Regent pulled his SUV into the driveway of his partner’s house in the Enterprise district of Redding at six past eight that evening. Shadows were stretched out into long, nightmarish caricatures, but the temperature did not drop. It was a muggy heat that seemed to get muggier as the evening drew on.

Regent got out of the SUV, walked into the open garage, past Josh Garner’s cherry-red classic Corvette. He went to the side door of the house and went through it into the laundry room, through there into the kitchen. It felt good to step out of that miserable heat and into Regent’s place – he always kept the air conditioner on high and the temperature low.

It was a nice house. Each bedroom in this house was a studio for a different website, decorated appropriately. Garner stayed here only occasionally. He had a much nicer house just north of town, out toward the lake. He and Regent both had other homes. Garner had an apartment in San Francisco, Regent had a house in Lake Tahoe, they shared a condo in Park City, Utah. The websites had been exceptionally good to them.

“Hey, anybody home?” he called.

“Be right there,” Garner replied from somewhere in the house.

There was an open bag of Laura Scudders Maui Sweet Onion Potato Chips on the counter, and Regent went to it, picked it up, plunged a hand in. He leaned his hips back on the edge of the tile counter, put one of the chips in his mouth, tasted it, and nodded with approval.

Garner walked in wearing a bathrobe, his hair wet.

“Where do you get all these weird potato chips?” Regent said. “I come over here and you’ve always got these weird, exotic potato chips. You shop someplace funny?”

“You just have to look for them, they’re everywhere,” Garner said.

“Have you seen the pictures of Kendra I sent you?”

Garner rolled his eyes and whistled. “I’ve seen them. She’s… fanfuckingtastic. There’s only one problem, and it’s a big one.”

Regent frowned. A problem? A big one?

“How are you gonna top that?” Garner said as he opened the refrigerator. He took a bottle of beer from it and twisted the cap off, took a swig. “She’s untoppable. After her, it’s all downhill. You’re gonna open the site with her, and then everything after her is anticlimactic.” He searched the shelves for something.

“You think she’s that good?”

Garner turned to him with wide eyes. “She’s incredible. I got wood before she even took her clothes off. But you need more of her, Steven, more, a lot more.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“You want one of these?” Garner said.

“Yeah.”

He handed a beer to Regent, then closed the refrigerator door.

“What were you looking for?” Regent said.

“I don’t know. Something to eat. I’m kinda hungry. Ish. But nothing sounds good.”

“Want me to order pizza?”

“Hm, pizza. Sure, go ahead.”

“What’s up tonight, anyway?” Regent said as he went to the phone.

“Change that. I don’t want pizza. I want Chinese food. Where’s the menu from Oriental Express?”

“You’re asking me? You live here.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Garner got up and went to the pockets of old mail and scribbled messages and jotted phone numbers that hung on the wall beside the phone, three of them in a vertical row. He rifled through them and found the pink menu folded up in the second pocket. He opened it up and looked it over. “What do you like, Steven?”

“Chow mein, sweet-and-sour prawns, broccoli beef, I’m easy to please,” Regent said.

Garner called the number at the top of the menu and ordered several different dishes, along with some rice and an order of crab puffs.

“That’s a big order,” Regent said. “I take it we’ve got company coming?”

“Yep. Alicia.”

Regent nearly spit up his beer. He gulped it down, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he laughed. “You’re kidding. She has got to like it, man. I mean, she must really want it, she keeps coming back so much.”

“You’re just figuring that out? She gets off on it – on doing it, and on people seeing it on the Internet. Especially on people seeing it. It gets her off. Which is why she keeps coming back for more. The money’s gravy, far as she’s concerned. She’d probably do it if there was no money involved.”

“What’d you need me for?” Regent said.

“She’s bringing a friend.”

“A friend?”

“Yep.”

“Have you seen this friend?”

“Not yet.” Garner took a few more gulps of beer, and the bottle was empty. He turned and put it on the counter behind him. “And there’s no guarantee with the friend.”

“What do you mean, there’s no guarantee? You mean she might be ugly as a jar of warts?”

“No, Alicia says she’s a real looker. But she’s curious.”

“Oh. Curious.”

“Yep.” He opened the refrigerator, took out another beer, twisted it open with a phut sound. “She doesn’t know if she’ll do anything, or if she does, how far she’ll go with it. So she may just end up watching.”

“I hope not. You got some good weed?”

“Good weed and good whisky. We’ll get them well-lubricated.”

“What time are they coming?”

“Should be here any time.”

Regent opened his second beer a few seconds before the doorbell rang.

“The ladies have arrived,” Garner said as he left the kitchen.

“Either that or some really fast Chinese food,” Regent said as he followed him.

Alicia was a busty, blowsy dark-blonde with a lot of freckles all over her body, but oddly none on her face, who liked to laugh and drink. She wasn’t a great looker – in fact, she was quite plain with a chubby face to match her plump body – but she was an animal in front of the camera, and the members of MILFParade.com loved her. She had loyal fans who sent her money and gifts. She wasn’t much to look at, but there was little, if anything, she wouldn’t do in front of the cameras. Her friend Beverly was a short, slender brunette with a beautiful face and a body that filled her green tank top and blue shorts quite nicely. She had a great tan and shapely legs, a tight ass, and nice round breasts that weren’t too big and weren’t too small. She had a long slender neck and an exotic face, with almond-shaped eyes – she almost looked Asian. Unlike Alicia, Beverly was a looker.

Garner poured drinks and said the food was on the way, but in the meantime, “Drink up!”

Reznick parked across the street and wished the sun would go down faster. After dark, he was just another car parked at the curb, but in daylight, he was plainly visible sitting there staring at the house to his left across the street.

First, he’d followed Alicia Carey to an apartment complex on Hilltop where she had picked up a woman. She’d stayed there for a while. Then he’d followed her and her friend here, to this house on Jupiter Street in a subdivision of streets named after planets.

He turned his head to the right. He was parked in front of a house not unlike the one he was watching. Ranch-style, a semicircular driveway with an entrance and an exit, double doors with beveled glass in the rectangular windows. A landscaped yard with an old-fashioned tire swing hanging from a branch of a big old oak in the front yard.

The yard across the street looked much the same, but without the swing. The double doors didn’t have any glass in them. The drapes were drawn on the large window in front. But Reznick had learned a great deal could be seen through the narrow slit between closed drapes.

Of course, he couldn’t walk over there and start peering into windows in the light of the late day. So he waited.

Regent worked on Alicia’s friend, Beverly.

“You look like you could use some more whisky,” Regent said.

“Oh, no, really, I probably shouldn’t,” she said as he poured more into her glass on the coffee table.

“More ice?” he said.

She laughed and shook her head. “I really shouldn’t, but… yeah, more ice.”

He scooped his hand into the ice bucket Garner had brought out and dropped a few cubes into her glass.

“I understand you’re curious about what we do,” he said as he handed her the glass.

“Oh, yeah, well… yes, I am.” She laughed. She was clearly nervous. Her second drink should relax her.

“You married, Bev?”

“Oh, no. Not the marrying type. I enjoy being single.” She sipped her drink, then sipped it again, a little more fully the second time.

“Good for you. Kind of frees you up to… well, to experiment.”

She grinned and leaned toward him and said, “Yes, that’s right.” The whisky was kicking in. She put a hand on his arm and said, “I don’t mind a little experimentation now and then.”

“You ever been with another woman?”

“I tried it once,” she said. “It wasn’t bad, really. But I’ve never gotten around to doing it again.”

“Ever been with her?” he said, nodding to Alicia, who was standing across the room looking at a large painting on the wall, talking with Garner.

“No.”

“Would you like to be?”

“Well… I dunno.” She smirked. It was a flirtatious smirk. Another sip from her glass, followed by a couple gulps.

Regent smiled.

She said, “Do I get to experiment with you a little?”

“I think that could be arranged,” he said.

She put her drink on the end table. They kissed, and she was aggressive – her tongue plunged into his mouth and she sucked his tongue into hers. Her hands moved all over him as they kissed, all over his back, his chest, his face and hair.

Suddenly, she was on him, straddling his lap and pulling at his pants.

“Whoa,” he said, pulling his head back. “Let’s save it for the cameras.”

“Really?” she said. Her eyes got big for a moment, then narrowed and crinkled up. She curled up against him, her head on his chest. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

“Oh, sure you can. Easiest thing in the world. Now, why don’t you finish that drink so I can pour you some more.”

Reznick waited for the dark, then got out of his car. He was parked between street lights, so he was hidden by darkness between them when he crossed the silent, empty street. He stepped up on the sidewalk in front of the house, then turned right, his sneakers quiet on the concrete. He turned left, walked up the driveway, on the far side of the cars parked there.

Crickets chirped somewhere, and a frog croaked nearby. There were gardenias growing in front of the house, and the hot, humid night air was thick with their sweet fragrance.

The garage and the house were attached, but the garage was set back from the front of the house. There was a side window on the house that appeared to look into the same room as the large front window, and Reznick went to it. He peered through the sliver of space between the drapes. Couch, coffee table, chairs, fireplace, television – it was a living room. An empty living room – there was no one there.

Reznick cocked his head and listened closely for something, anything.

Was that the hint of voices he heard? Laughter?

They had gone to the rear of the house.

He doubled back and crossed the front of the garage, then turned left around its corner. He walked down a narrow passageway between the side of the garage on his left, and a six-foot-tall wooden fence on his right. The fence divided this yard from the neighbor’s. He came to a gate that matched the fence in height. He fumbled around in the dark for a latch. He found it a moment later and flipped it up, pushed the gate open and went through. He closed the gate behind him, latched it, then walked on until he came to the end of the garage.

He stopped at the garage’s back corner and very carefully, slowly, peeked around the edge. There was no one there, but he saw a window with light in it. He stepped around the corner and saw that the window’s drapes were open, and there were people on the other side of the window moving around, and Reznick quickly stepped back behind the cover of the garage’s corner.

Once again, he moved forward slowly, peered around that edge.

A naked man stood by the window. A moment later, he was joined by a naked woman who threw her arms around him and lifted her knee up high on his hip. Then she pulled back, took his hand, and pulled him away from the window.

The light came through the window and spread over the ground in a widening rectangle. Reznick neared the window but stayed out of the light. He walked around it and along the other side to the edge of the window. He pressed his back to the wall beside the window.

The window was to his right, and to his left was another corner, the corner of the house. Beyond it was a swimming pool, a small pool house to the right, and what appeared, in the dark of night, to be a sprawling, gently down sloping back yard beyond that.

He looked to his right again, at the window. From where he stood, he could see down a hallway. The window was at the end of that hallway, facing an open doorway across the hall.

Reznick turned around and faced the wall of the house, and slowly eased his head around the edge of the window. No one was looking his way.

The window looked across the hall at an open doorway, into a room. Naked people stepped in and out of view. Across the room from the open door was a bed with the covers in a tangle at the foot. On the wall above the bed was a large colorful banner that read MILFPARADE.COM – HOT MAMAS ONLINE!

Someone brought a light into view and set it up in front of the bed. As far as Reznick could tell, it was the kind of light used in photography or video sessions.

Alicia Carey got on the bed.

Reznick quickly removed his phone from his pocket, opened it up, and began taking pictures.

Alicia jumped up and down on the bed like a teenage girl at a slumber party. Another naked woman got on the bed and joined her.

A naked man approached the bed and waved his arms back and forth, shaking his head at the same time, like a disapproving adult. They stopped jumping and sat down. The woman who had joined Alicia got up and left. A man joined Alicia.

Reznick kept taking pictures.