Too Close to Home

“I think I lost a tooth, you fucker,” she said to Randall Finley.

“Serves you right,” the mayor said. “You’re not supposed to bite the goddamn thing off, you know.”

“You jumped,” she said, and sniffed. “It was an accident.”

“I called Lance, too,” the mayor told me. “He’s coming.”

“Terrific,” I said. “Let me guess. He set this up.”

The mayor said nothing. I turned my attention to the girl. What had struck me from the moment I’d seen her was how young she looked.

“How old are you?” I asked.

She was still rubbing her jaw, doing her best to ignore me.

“I asked you a question,” I said.

“Nineteen,” she snapped. I almost laughed. There was a purse on the bedside table and I grabbed it.

“Hey!” the girl said. “That’s mine!”

I unzipped it, started rooting around inside. There were lipsticks, other makeup, half a dozen condoms, a cell phone, a small coil-topped notepad, and a wallet.

“Cutter, for Christ’s sake,” the mayor said, one hand pointed at the girl, the other pressed over his crotch. “Forget about her. You need to get me to a doctor or something.”

The girl tried to grab her purse back but I swung it away. I looked in the wallet for a driver’s license. When the only ID I could find was a Social Security card and a high school ID, I figured she wasn’t yet old enough to drive. The name on the cards was Sherry Underwood.

“According to this, Sherry,” I said, putting emphasis on her name, “you’re fifteen years old.”

The same age as Derek at the time.

“Okay, so?” Sherry Underwood said.

The mayor had gone into the bathroom and was stuffing wads of toilet paper down the front of his shorts. He wasn’t in an absolute panic now, not like he’d been when he phoned me, so I was guessing he was suffering from more of a superficial wound, as opposed to anything approaching an amputation.

I looked at him as he came back out of the bathroom. “You knew this?” I asked.

“Knew what?”

“That she’s fifteen?”

The mayor feigned shock. “Fuck, no. She told me she was twenty-two.”

No one could look at that girl and think she was twenty-two. “If she’d told you she was Hillary Clinton, would you have believed that too, Randy?”

“Randy?” he said, glaring at me. “Since when did you start calling me that?”

“Would you rather I said ‘Your Worship’?”

“Jesus, you a minister?” the girl asked, her eyes wide.

Finley said nothing. Better to let her think that than tell her he was the mayor, if he hadn’t already made that blunder.

Still holding on to Sherry’s wallet and purse, I asked, “You okay?”

“He kicked me,” she said. “Right in the face.”

“How’d that happen?”

“He was, like, on his back on the bed and he jumped-”

“She caught me with her teeth,” the mayor said.

“Shut up,” I said to him.

The mayor opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

“He jumped,” I repeated for her. “Then what?”

“I took him out of my mouth and moved back and he brought up his leg and kicked me in the face.” She looked at Finley. “That’s what you did, you asshole.”

“Sherry,” I said, “you should go to the hospital, see a doctor.”

“Christ’s sake!” the mayor said, throwing some bloodied paper into the wastebasket. “I’m the one who needs medical attention. What the fuck are you doing, asking her if she needs to go to a hospital?”

I gave the mayor my best stare. “I’d be happy to take you to the ER right now if you’d like, but first I have to make a call to the Standard.”

The mayor blinked. That was all he needed, to have the press show up asking about his bit dick. He mumbled something under his breath and went back into the bathroom.

I turned my attention back to Sherry Underwood. “Whaddya say?”

She was getting to her feet. “My shoes,” she said. “I have to find my shoes.”

I saw a pair of high-heeled sandals half tucked under the bed. “Over here,” I said, pointing. Sherry slipped her feet into them, teetered on them precariously, an amateur. She’d need a couple more years to master them.

“I guess I’m okay,” she said.

“You got parents?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said.

“What’s that mean?”

“They’re dead,” she said. “More or less.”

“Who looks after you?” I asked.

“Linda.”

“Who’s Linda?” Then I thought, the girl in the hall?

“She’s my friend. We look after each other.”

“Sherry, you’re a kid, this is no way to live. There are people, agencies, folks who can help you out.”

“I’m okay,” she insisted.

“No, you are not okay.” I looked into her purse again, pulled out the notebook. I flipped through the pages. It was part diary, part address book, part accounting ledger. One page would have a date followed by a column of numbers, presumably how much she’d made that day. Another page would have a couple of phone numbers next to names or initials, like J., Ed, P., and L.R. I didn’t, at a glance, see Randy’s name in there. I flipped past more pages of shopping lists, license plate numbers, the phone number for something called “Willows,” until I finally reached a blank page.

“That’s personal stuff,” Sherry said.

I took a pen from inside my jacket and wrote “Jim Cutter.” And wrote down my phone number.