Only because it’s my birthday and the best gift my husband could give me was to take the kids and give me the day to write, I now present…

The Strand (a fiction Outtake)

“Trev, what do we do? We can’t take ’em back to the house; Ma’s got that party tonight, remember? And neither of them have a place… what do we do?

“Chill,” Trevor told Mitchell, hating the way the guy was getting all twitchy like some Tourette’s patient, except without the interesting vocabulary.

“The Bronco’s out after last time…”

“I know, I know,” Trevor said, trying to think fast. The girls would be back from the john in a minute or two, and they’d want a plan if they were going to head home satisfied. As if Mitchell knew how to satisfy a girl, but he was learning.

Dragging them to All Access just to use the back room wasn’t a particularly good idea, either. Spending time there before heading back was fine, but showing up just for a quick fuck apparently wasn’t.

They were at Decade, in fact, which was in one of the seedier parts of town, which meant that… “There’s always The Strand,” he offered.

Mitchell shuddered.

“Oh, like you’ve been there,” Trev sniffed. “Fuck, even I haven’t. Yet. Let’s take the girls, make it a joke and see if we can get them to cough up something better.”

Mitchell’s eyes got so big, Trevor was afraid they’d fall out of the idiot’s head. “We can’t go there! We’ll catch something for sure!”

Trevor lit a cigarette and blew smoke in Mitchell’s face. “How can you stand being such a dork?”

Mitchell stuttered and stammered something clear up until the girls came back.

“Look, we don’t have anywhere better to go, ourselves, so how about we do a double over at The Strand? Have some fun, destroy a room and run like hell?”

Trev’s girl, a brunette who, he swore, had been a prostitute only a week before, shrugged. Mitchell’s girl, who had boring brown hair but tits to make up for it, nodded eagerly. “I’ve always wanted to know what it’s really like in there,” she half-squealed. “Even if we don’t get naked, it’ll be worth the money, just to see the place.”

“And then we can get naked another time!” Trevor told her with false enthusiasm. He and Mitchell hadn’t done a particularly good job picking girls; they weren’t worth much more than The Strand, he decided.

Figured it was all working out; it always did now that he was away from Hank. That guy poisoned everything around him, even before he’d touched Trevor.

Yeah, Trev thought as he slung his arm around his girl and steered her out of Decade and down the street to The Strand, life was much better away from Hank.

They paused on the street outside the front door. “We’re doing this for real, right?” he asked everyone.

Mitchell looked about as white as his hair, but he nodded and tightened his grip on his chick. Taking it as foreplay, she snuggled against him and licked his neck.

The idiot blushed.

The lobby wasn’t much more than an office. Not even that; just a space to stand while you signed in and paid, which Trevor took charge of. M was scared enough that he’d probably forgotten how to write, let alone tell believable lies on the register, and it was just classless to let the girls take charge. Let the feminists burn their fucking bras in his face for all he cared; with Trevor Wolff, chivalry was not dead.

Through the probably-bullet-proof plexiglass, the guy slid him a room key and buzzed them through a dirty white security door. He and Mitchell exchanged looks as they passed; maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. But a room for seventy-five cents? How could they argue?

They should have, they decided as they got into the hallway. It reeked — of bodies, of sex, of piss, of puke. It smelled worse than All Access, and that was not an easy smell to top. It was bright enough, though, which sorta surprised Trevor. “Aren’t these places supposed to be dark?” he asked Mitchell, who bobbed his head like he was too stupid to do anything but agree.

Mitchell found Room 32 first. Around the second corner; the place made a cube. What was in the middle, Trevor didn’t know. Probably a holding place for prostitutes or else a triple-x-rated peep show that was miraculously free for any vice cop who happened inside.

The room was about the same as the hall, only it smelled like bleach. Trev’s girl covered her nose with her hand. “Okay, I’ve seen enough,” she said with a shudder. “They only do this when someone dies in here.”

“Maybe they just bled a lot,” Mitchell laughed, peeking into the bathroom. Trevor stared at him; the guy seemed comfortable and at home. Had an alien been waiting inside the room and taken M over when he’d walked in?

“What do we do now?” his girl asked, touching the bedspread with her long, lacquered nail. Trevor noticed it was orange, and it would have matched the orange bedspread maybe back when the spread had been new — which had probably been thirty years ago, back when orange was in and avocado was a great color for a kitchen appliance.

“We should leave,” Trevor’s girl said.

“Wait, I want to look around,” Trevor said, following Mitchell — who still hadn’t come out of the bathroom. Either the killer was still there, or the guy was taking a whiz.

Neither; he was inspecting the bathtub. “Can you imagine?”

Trevor didn’t want to tell him it had fewer cracks than the one in Hank’s house. It was cleaner, too.

But, of course, Hank had liked sticking them in the bathtub before he’d reached his ugliest point. Less to clean up, he’d laughed. Trevor also thought the guy had gotten a hard-on, watching them try new ways to escape.

He shuddered; that shit was best left where it belonged. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this joint.”

Mitchell looked at him funny. “You okay?”

“Sure. Nothing that won’t get cured by leaving this shit-hole. We came, we saw, we left. Wasn’t that what we wanted?”

The kid squirmed. “I thought we wanted the girls to cough up a place. You know…”

“Yeah,” Trevor sighed, “I know.”