The house was in the hot part of Hollywood. The part where the sun doesn’t shine tourist-bright and pleasant, but rather hot and oppressive; the part where you’d never dream in your wildest scar-dust dreams that there was a great big, cool blue ocean only five miles away. In this part of Hollywood, people were actually punished for their sins.

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An amber bulb lit up on the board and Audrey Cain reflexively inserted a plug into the hole below it.

“Mr. Gray’s office. May I help you?” she asked as automatically as she had made the connection. She barely heard the name on the other end of the line before plugging in the wire to connect the call and disconnecting herself.

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I stayed in bed, pretending to be asleep until Nola left for work. I needed to piss and take a dump in the worst way but I knew if I got up while she was still home, she would get into it with me about getting out of the apartment and finding a fucking job.

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Tom represented what I always wanted in a man. That he exhibited the qualities of kindness and humor and strength might not have been apparent to me at first, but the more time we spent together, the more he revealed himself to be the man I’d dreamt of finding.

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I could tell the dame was trouble as soon as she slithered into my office.

A real Sherlock Holmes type might have deduced this by scientific observation of her blood-red stiletto-heeled shoes, in the context of the matching miniskirt, spaghetti-strap top, lipstick and fingernails, and all this at nine-thirty-seven in the morning. But I’ve had the dubious advantage of knowing Annie for twenty-three years, and trust me, my kid sister has been trouble since she learned to talk.

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