“Well, she was always a cutie,” Mickey said through a mouthful of McChicken. “I was a year older than her. And everyone agreed she was cute as hell. But no one wanted to touch her because of her old man, you know?”

“Because of his rep?” I asked, slurping on a milkshake. My first since getting out of prison, which made it the best milkshake I’d ever had.

“Well, yeah, but not in the way you think. I mean, what kind of high school boy gives two shits about what a hot chick’s dad does? Would you have given up on a girl just because her dad was a cop or something?”

I grinned. No, I would not. At sixteen I was the perfect mixture of stupid, overconfident, short sighted. I felt bad for the fathers who found themselves dealing with me. I could remember jumping out of more than one girl’s window in the middle of the night.

“So what was it, then?”

“Millions scared the shit out of me. It was pretty much drilled into every little boy’s head that touching Misty was the quickest path to an early grave. Some kid tried to force a kiss on her in seventh grade and ended up drinking his meals out of a straw for the next couple of years.”

“Huh,” I said, reflecting on this. It made sense, in a way. Millions cherished his little girl. But it was also kind of psychotic. And it made me pity her a bit. Being a teenager is supposed to be about making mistakes and getting laid and making mistakes while you get laid. I didn’t think Misty got to do much of the first two, which automatically cut out the third.

Still, she had her old man. That was something more than a lot of people could say. Someone was looking out for her. Someone cared enough to threaten strangers’ sons with a swift and violent justice if they crossed a line with her.

“That her?” Mickey pointed with a french fry to a mini-skirted woman at the soda machine.

I blinked, calling up the picture Suzy had shown me. Turns out she didn’t have a printer, all her pictures were online, and the shitty burner cellphone I’d picked up wasn’t going to be taking any snapshots. It was alright though; I could remember. Having a good memory for faces is a desirable trait when you deal with people who like to use pseudonyms.

“No, I said. “She’s got a tattoo on her bicep, and her nose is longer.”

“Anyway, I was friendly with her, and obviously would have liked to be more than friendly with her, but her old man wasn’t having any of it. It was a I’ve-got-a-dick thing.”

I nodded along wondering what Millions would think about me if he was still breathing. Here I was, living under her roof, sleeping a few feet away from her and letting my imagination get away from me more often than I cared to admit.

“Well, I guess he’s not around to keep the men away anymore,” I mused aloud.

“I guess not,” Mickey smirked. “Or you’d be sleeping under the house rather than in it. You think she’s gonna cave?”

“Cave?”

“C’mon. You just got out of prison and you’re living with some of Sorghum Bend’s most eligible pussy. Unless your time in the joint made your swing set change directions, you’ve gotta be jonesing.”

“Sure,” I said. “But she’s a goddamn nightmare. Last night she damn near made a shish-kebab out of my eyeball just for putting my hands on her shoulders.”

“That’s further than any guy I ever knew got with her,” Mickey grinned. “Hey… is that her?”

The Dragonfly was downright teeming with filth. The girls were the best of them. I spotted at least four tweakers picking up from the dealer behind the front desk, a few black-eyed women following big-fisted men, a portly guy looking for a little extracurricular love, and a few rail-thin young lovers who were probably not long for this world.

I felt like a prince by comparison.

The girl Big Mickey pointed to wasn’t the one I was looking for, but she had a friend coming out of the room behind her.

Jackpot.

“The other one,” I said, tossing the last of my fast food back into the sack. “That’s her.”

“Double trouble,” Mickey said as the girls waved bye-bye to a man old enough to be their father. They stood in the doorway for a while, talking. Not-Tallulah scratched at her face in a way indicative of heavy addiction. After a couple minutes, she gestured to the front desk, and headed across the parking lot. I’d seen the look on her face enough times to know she’d be off getting a fix.

That was well enough for us. I needed answers, and I’d have a better chance of getting them so long as Tallulah was alone.

“Hey,” Mickey hung out the side of the car calling to our girl. The one on her way to the office turned but barely acknowledged us, apparently content to let Tallulah handle us herself. And like any good working girl, Tallulah wasn’t too good to deny us her company. Sauntering over, she was a long-legged stick bug in daisy dukes. A pretty girl, at least for now. She wouldn’t be pretty for long working out of a place like this, a fact made all the more apparent once I noticed the thin line of track marks running along the inside bend of her arm.

“Hay is for horses,” she rasped, coming to the window and lighting up. She gave Mickey and I each a good look.

“I don’t do doubles,” she said. “But my friend will take…”

“Nah, honey,” I said, leaning across Mickey’s bulky form to look her in the eye. “That’s not why we’re here.”

“I don’t sell junk,” she said. “Talk to Donny in the office for that.”

“Not that either, Tallulah.”

Well, that got her. It got her eyes narrowing, and her hand shaking a bit, and her mouth screwing up in distaste.

“Who sent ya? I never signed no contract with Suzy. I’m a free woman. You can tell her she can’t scare me.”

“Suzy didn’t send us,” I said. “If you’ll stop trying to guess why we’re here for five seconds, I’ll happily tell you.”

“Twenty bucks and I’ll shut up,” she snapped. Hell. You had to admire her. Chuckling, I drew a twenty from my wallet - I’d cashed the check that constituted my remaining commissary money first thing this morning, and I still had most of my release cash… but at this rate, I’d be shaking an empty wallet by sunset.

Mickey had on one of his sickeningly genuine million-watt smiles. Like I said, he was a nice guy. As far as muscle goes, he was only good for looks - if he ever actually had to get physical with someone, I think he might claim to be Buddhist. Tallulah studied the bill like it might be counterfeit, and she might be able to tell. Her pink shirt said Cowgirl in rhinestones, surrounded by swirly designs.

“What?” she spat.

“A while ago you had a client…”

“I got a lotta clients!”

“What’d I just pay you for?”

She sneered, but she closed her mouth.

“You’ll remember this one. He was flying on something crazy and talking about pirates. You remember?”

“Clint?” the name flew right out of her mouth, bing bang boom. I saw the regret in her eyes; her knee-jerk reaction just lost her the chance to make some more cash.

“If you say so, doll,” I said. “Clint, huh?”

“Maybe,” she sneered. I didn’t wait for her to raise the price, but put another two twenties in her hand. She glanced at Mickey.

“You don’t talk?”

“No one’s paying me to talk,” he said smoothly. “Unlike some people here…”

Tallulah grunted, sliding her cash into the back of her shorts.

“Name was Clint. I had him four or five times as a client. 21 if he was a day. Red hair, freckles, cute kid. One milky eye, though. Kind of grossed me out. I’d turn the light out and…”

“I don’t need to know how big his dick is Tallulah. Does Clint have a last name? Do you know who he worked for?”

She seemed to be considering the chances that I’d throw some more cash her way, but the expression on my face convinced her she’d gotten all she was gonna get.

“Last name was something Irish. O-something. Worked for an Irish guy, too. I don’t know. He never said who it was, but he talked about how he liked working for one of his own kind. I think he was a little zebraphobic.”

“Xenophobic,” Mickey said, translating for her.

“No, dumbass,” she smirked. “He wasn’t afraid of no fuckin’ TV character. He was afraid of foreigners and shit. He said he liked bein’ Irish and workin’ Irish, but he wished his boss would be more selective. He believed me when I told him I was a Mick. I’m not.”

“Was he straight off the boat, or second generation?”

“He talked as straight American as me or you,” she said. “That’s all I’ve got for you. Now, either you buy what I’m trynna sell here, or get out of here before I get my man on your asses.”

I believed her. Even if she knew more than she was saying, I could tell she was shutting down on us. I could throw my whole damn commissary balance at her and not get anything useful.

“Thanks, love,” I said, nodding my chin at Mickey to get us out of there. We didn’t speak again until the Dragonfly was well behind us.

“Irish, huh?” Mickey mused aloud. “That narrows it down.”

“Heh,” I said. “Yeah, right.”

Sorghum Bend had always been split down the middle, Italians and Irish. Afflicted with that particular homogeneity that curses many a small Southern town. Frankly, no one had any reason to move to Sorghum Bend, so it was mostly the same families living in the same neighborhoods for generations.

Most of the Italians had come up from Mississippi and Louisiana after the Civil War, when those states became particularly inhospitable to the established population. The Irish came to work the railroad. And since both were generally ill-regarded by American society at large, and could abide the other with a decorum of polite disdain, they settled together in Sorghum Bend.

The Irish could have their farms on the hilly lowlands, and the Italians could set up their shops, and both could work for the Redfern Timber Company. Least that’s how things got started… Logging wasn’t so fashionable anymore, but the Irish still farmed and the Italians still ran the downtown district.

To make a long story short, there were a shit ton of Irish people in Sorghum Bend. A certain cliche about needles and haystacks drifted through my mind.

“Listen, thanks for the ride,” I said, sighing. “You got someplace to be, or can I buy you a beer?”

“Free as a bird,” Mickey said with a smile. “Two heads are better than one, right? You’ve been away for a while. Let me catch you up on some of your suspects.”

“Can we make one stop?” I asked.

“Anywhere you wanna go, man,” Mickey said. “You know how tickled I am to see you in the passenger seat? Shiiiiiit…”

I threw him a punch as he laughed at my scowl. It was really getting to me. I was a driver. It’s what I did. My blood was gasoline. My heart was a battery. My hands fit on a steering wheel like a man fits inside a woman.

That got my head wheeling in a dangerous direction. For a brief moment, I wondered what it might feel like to drive myself deep into little Misty’s willing depths…

“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled, throwing that idea straight back out of my head. “I’ll have a car again soon enough. You’ll see.”

“I’m sure I will,” Mickey said, watching me watching the road. “Cheer up. Parole don’t last forever.”

No, but it might last a lifetime, depending on how long you had to live. Helping Misty was the right thing, the only thing, but it wouldn’t all be skinny whores needing a fix, and I knew it. I could be a frog in hot water. I might be boiled alive. And if I never drove again, before I went to my eternal punishment?

Well, that’d be almost as bad as never fucking again.

Almost.