Puss in Boots (Matthew Hope) by McBain Ed

Author:McBain, Ed [McBain, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2012-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

“Don’t touch,” the girl sitting in the booth with Tick and Mose said. “Read the sign. You can look, but you can’t touch.”

She said this because Mose had his hand on her thigh.

“Otherwise we’ll get busted,” she said.

She was in her mid-twenties, Tick guessed, a not very good-looking blonde wearing a costume that wouldn’t have been welcomed at the Snowflake Ball across town because her costume was her underwear.

Tick wondered where the notion had started that a woman in her underwear was sexier than a woman in just her skin. France, he guessed. La Directrice had dressed Connie in a startling array of underwear, coming up with variations Tick had never even seen in the pages of Penthouse. Connie had looked very sexy in all that underwear, but Connie would have looked sexy in a potato sack. Connie was what was known in the trade as a natural.

The blonde was wearing a black garter belt, black bikini panties, black net nylons, and black high-heeled shoes. No bra. Except for her naked breasts, she did not look very natural in her underwear, nor did she look particularly sexy. She looked too heavily made up and too sleazily underdressed, and she stank of cheap perfume, and she seemed much older than her twenty-some-odd years, and far more hard-edged, and far more worn. She looked like a hooker.

Which Tick guessed she was.

“How long have you been doing this sort of thing?” Tick asked.

“What are you, a social worker?” the girl asked. “Hey, listen, I mean it,” she said to Mose, whose hand was on her thigh again. She plucked the hand off as if it were a piece of lint. “The state attorney has people coming in and out of here all the time, Skye Bannister, you familiar with that name?”

“No,” Tick said.

“The state attorney,” she said. “He’ll close us down in a minute if he thinks anything funny’s going on in here, which of course it isn’t.”

“Of course not,” Tick said. “What’s your name?”

“Kim,” she said.

Tick guessed there were eight million girls named Kim in the topless joints across the length and breadth of America.

“Kim, we’re looking for a particular person,” Mose said.

Straight to the point. Good old fucking dumb Mose.

“What’s the matter with me?” Kim said. “I happen to think I’m pretty particular.”

“No, I meant—”

“What he meant,” Tick said, “is we think a friend of ours may be working in Calusa, and we’d like very much to find her.”

“What are you, cops?” Kim said.

“Do I look like a cop?” Tick said.

She looked at him. “No,” she said, “but who can tell nowadays? Nowadays you get cops they look more like crooks than crooks do.”

“We’re not cops,” Mose said.

She looked at Mose.

“Then what are you?”

“Friends of this girl we’re trying to find,” Mose said.

“What girl?”

“A redhead,” Tick said.

“What’s her name? We got four redheads here, two of them on tonight. One of them’s up there dancing right this minute.”

They looked toward the small stage around which a dozen or more tables were arranged.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.