Chapter 26

THE BLARING OFa horn woke me. When I looked out my bedroom window, Tox Barnes was sitting in the driver’s seat of his black ’69 Mustang, revving the engine. When I got in the car he tossed his phone into my lap.

“Check it out, zombie face,” he said.

“‘Zombie face’?”

He flipped the mirror down in front of me. He was right: I looked decidedly undead. I rubbed my eyes and raked back my apparently homosexual hair, slapping the mirror away.

On the phone screen was a video on pause. I clicked play, and the car was filled with the sound of deep-throated groaning and grunting.

“Urgh.” I threw the phone back at him with barely a glimpse of the bare thrusting ass on the screen. “You’re disgusting.”

“I’m not sharing my porn with you. That’s our victim, Claudia Burrows.”

I took the phone back and watched. The camera panned around the ass and up the thighs of a petite blond woman. I’d seen that mouth before, with Tox Barnes’s finger in it.

“Where’d you find this?”

“I was trying to figure out how she got those tits,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “Her bank account showed she’d never been able to afford them. Then I got to thinking—adult film producers will sometimes pay for larger hooters for their actresses if they agree to appear in a certain number of movies. The films sell better if the girls have got a set of big juicy—”

“All right, all right, all right.”

“She appears in that video as Claudia Dee.” He pointed with his cigarette. “Had an old porn addict I know dig it up for me. It’s about a month old. Straight to DVD, not available online.”

“Nice work.”

“Maybe that’s where the big payoff was coming from,” he said, roaring through the traffic like a lunatic, weaving in and out of the oncoming cars. “Maybe there was a feature film coming up.”

“Yeah, and maybe she pulled out of the big film,” I said, “and someone decided they weren’t going to be messed with like that. I’ve met plenty of these porn guys. Women are just like horses to them. When they break down, or they go wild, you take them out the back and put a bullet in their brains.”