At the Denny’s on Crenshaw Boulevard I took a booth at the back of the restaurant, far from the front doors and any windows, close to the bathrooms so that I could duck in there if I saw anyone who remotely looked like they worked in law enforcement. I wore sunglasses, used the menu as a shield and kept one eye on the patrons around me. Sneak was drawing looks in her skimpy tank top and skirt as she perused the menu.
‘It’s too big,’ she said finally, slapping the menu down. ‘I’m not used to this kind of choice. There are fifteen types of pancakes. I can’t do it.’
‘Just get the Grand Slam and a coffee,’ I said.
‘You look more suspicious acting like that than you would if you just sat there like a normal person, you know.’ She picked her teeth with a folded straw. ‘If a parole officer or someone catches us together, you just offer them something.’
‘Offer them what?’
‘Money, idiot.’
‘I don’t have any money.’
‘A blow job, then.’
‘Jesus, Sneak.’ I shook my head. ‘Let’s try to focus, here. Last night: you get the call from Dayly. It gets cut off. You ask some people what they know. Then you reported her missing, right?’
Sneak fiddled with a napkin, didn’t answer.
‘Are you telling me you didn’t go to the police?’ I shifted in my seat. ‘Okay, we need to go there right now. That’s the first step.’
‘We don’t have to. The housemate will do it. You heard her. They were going to call nine-one-one.’
‘But you have to go in and tell them what you know.’ I settled back in the booth. ‘Tell them about the phone call.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘You know, I knew a guy once who robbed a Denny’s,’ she said, looking at the menu. ‘It was like that scene from Pulp Fiction. He swung a gun around, yelled and threatened everybody, had all the customers put their wallets in a trash bag.’
‘Sneak.’
‘He even went into the back and started hitting up all the chefs for their wallets and jewellery and stuff.’ Sneak sniffed. ‘But this fry cook got so scared she dropped a big bucket of cheese sauce on the floor and the guy slipped in it. Fell right on his ass. Dropped the gun and the bag and everything. That was the moment to grab him and make a citizen’s arrest. But the guy kept trying to get up on his own and slipping over in the sauce again. It was so funny everybody started laughing. They let him go. He ran out the back door covered in cheese sauce. Left the gun and the bag of goodies behind.’
‘Sneak, are you avoiding going to the police about Dayly because you’re wanted?’ I asked.
Sneak laughed, smoothing back her greasy, tired curls. ‘Wanted. You make me sound like Jesse fucking James.’
‘They can help us. This is your daughter we’re talking about here.’
‘I could be wanted,’ Sneak said. She gave a heavy sigh. ‘I don’t know. I heard they were looking at me for some stolen goods that may or may not have been found in a storage container with my name on it.’
I held my head. ‘You’re just a barrel of problems, you know that?’
The waitress came and we ordered. Sneak wrung her hands on the tabletop.
‘I can’t go in. If I get locked up now, I won’t be able to find my kid,’ she reasoned. ‘The cops know me. They’ll pin whatever they can on me. Then it’ll be all up to you.’
‘Me?’ I scoffed. ‘Why me?’
‘Because you’re the only person I’ve got on this,’ she said. She watched me carefully. ‘You are with me on this, right?’
‘Look.’ I chose my words carefully. ‘I’m . . . I’m not sure what we have here yet. I’m willing to bounce ideas around about where Dayly might be. But I’ve got my own kid, you know. I can’t risk getting taken away from him again.’
Sneak watched me silently weighing up my options.
‘I owe you,’ I admitted.
‘You sure do,’ she said. ‘I was waiting for you to get to that.’
‘You dragged me up out of a pretty dark hole in the Valley.’
‘I didn’t just come to you because you owe me,’ she said. ‘You’re tough. You’re good in a tight squeeze. You used to be a big important surgeon, and that makes you the smartest person I know. So now’s the time to tell me if you’re in or you’re out, because if you’re out, I’ve got to find another running mate.’
I thought about Jamie. Pictured myself telling him goodbye for another five years, trying to explain to him that I’d been doing something good for a friend when I sacrificed my relationship with him for another half a decade. It had been hard enough to pitch my story about my crime to him when I was released; that I’d done something terribly wrong that I hadn’t meant to do, and that despite my acting with the best of intentions, the police had put me away. It seemed impossible for a kid to understand. Impossible still that I would risk all that for Sneak and her daughter, a young woman I didn’t know.
But the fact was that Sneak had been the key to my survival in prison. She’d got me out of my stupor, and then she had simply been there – a woman sadly adjusted to the institutionalised life, someone who knew the routine, the language, the rules. She was my prison life tour guide. Sure, Sneak was bad company. She was constantly high, often embroiled in a feud with another inmate or an attempted romance with a guard, and she was so sticky-fingered that I had to keep anything I absolutely couldn’t afford to have stolen stuffed into my bra – emergency panty liners, pictures of Jamie, my postnatal medication. But every time she finished her stint at Happy Valley and disappeared from my life, I felt the ground crack underneath me. When she inevitably reappeared months or weeks later, it was like welcoming home my long-lost sister. Sneak never got down, no matter how long she was sentenced for, no matter how fruitless her attempts to go back into the real world seemed. She believed that if she let prison life break her, she might break others in turn, so she kept her head high. I admired that.
I also recognised a desire in me to join Sneak in the search for her daughter as the same kind of desire I’d felt during my time in the operating theatre. I wanted to sew Sneak and her child’s relationship back together. Patch it with neat white bandages. I had the chance to save a child here. Help a mother. Be a hero. It was what I had been doing before I was locked up. This was a sign, a test that, if I passed, would mean I still was the woman I had been before I was dumped in a jail cell. It would mean I was still good on the inside.
‘I’m with you,’ I told Sneak.
She smiled.
‘Tell me what you found out last night about Dayly. The word on the street,’ I said.
‘She’s been slipping.’ Sneak took out her phone and brought up something on the screen, pushed it towards me. ‘Friend of mine who works as a webcam girl showed me this. I’ll let you watch it. I need a cigarette.’
Sneak left and I examined her phone. She’d checked into a website called Rareshare-Hx.com. At the top of the screen a slick, shiny cartoon woman was giving a cartoon man a blow job in a dark room. Her head bobbed in an endless loop, big eyes locked on his, while a banner encouraged the viewer to ‘Try not 2 cum’. There was a list of categories above a collection of videos of real girls doing similar acts. In the thumbnail for the first video, the girl who had robbed me at the Pump’n’Jump was curled in the corner of a blue couch, a glass of wine in her hand. I tapped on the thumbnail and Dayly came to life, flapping a hand at the camera.
‘Stop,’ she said playfully. ‘This is so dumb.’
I watched for a while. The camera was set down, and from behind it emerged a small, lean man with a head of close-cropped black hair and an unreadable blue tattoo on his neck. Dayly and the man started making out on the couch. I scrolled down the screen and read the caption below the video.
Busty amateur teen blonde gets hammered hard on boyfriend’s couch.
The man in the video was peeling off Dayly’s shirt when a voice above me spoke.
‘Refill?’
The waiter was muscular and tanned, the green Denny’s polo clinging to his chest. I snapped the mute switch on the phone and slammed it down, screen to the table.
‘Yes, please,’ I managed.
I toyed with the nice stainless-steel salt and pepper shakers that were on the table as he went away. It had been a decade since a man had touched me intimately. That included everything from full-blown sex to a pat on the shoulder, a warm hug. The closest I had got to a hug was from Henry, Sasha’s husband, when I left prison, and I had come no nearer to the act than its imagining in my mind; the slow, deliberate mental repeat of his arms closing around my shoulders, his breath on my neck, his hips against my hips. I imagined it for weeks on end as my release date neared. But he never actually hugged me. Sasha and Henry had picked me up at the prison gates, and Henry had stayed in the car, turning and smiling in greeting as I slid into the back seat. The waiter leaned over now and filled Sneak’s cup, and I caught a whiff of his deodorant, saw the thick tendons move in his neck. Big hands and forearms.
‘Thanks,’ I said when he was done. ‘Could we maybe get some ice water, as well? If it’s not too much trouble.’
The waiter nodded, smiled and walked away. Sneak slid back into the booth with me.
‘Did you just try to pick up that waiter?’
‘I . . . What? No! No, I didn’t. Of course I didn’t.’
‘You had a look on your face like you were gonna drag him home to your sex dungeon and chain him to a rack.’
‘Please,’ I laughed. ‘I asked for ice water.’
‘To throw all over your steaming crotch?’
‘Sneak!’
‘You haven’t broken the curse yet, have you?’ She shook her head at me. She seemed grateful for something to latch on to that wasn’t her missing daughter. ‘You’ve been out a year and you haven’t been dicked.’
‘Can you just . . . Don’t say “dicked”.’ The waiter came and deposited our meals and the ice water, and I completely ignored him. ‘And put the salt and pepper shakers back.’
Sneak rolled her eyes and produced the items from her handbag, shoving them back onto the table.
‘This video of Dayly,’ I said. ‘It’s amateur porn.’
‘From a paid site.’ Sneak nodded as she spoke. ‘Viewer pays a fee to watch. The poster gets a cut of the profits. Maybe she was hard up for cash and did something stupid. Maybe her boyfriend filmed them and posted the video, hoping she’d never find out about it.’
‘This guy is her boyfriend?’ I asked. ‘Or is he just some douchebag?’
‘Boyfriend, apparently. I’ve got the name, the address. Dimitri Lincoln. He’s bad people. We need to talk to him, see what he knows. But he lives out in Temple City. If Dayly was willingly doing amateur porn, she was starting to circle the toilet. It’s how I started in the industry. I let a guy take some pictures of me to get money for Vicodin. Then I was giving blow jobs. Then I was out on street corners. If she was mixing with the wrong crowd, I want to know who was in that crowd.’
‘Okay.’ I nodded. ‘Sounds like a good lead.’
‘But Temple City is a hell of a cab ride. We’re going to need money and a car.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘I spent some of last night trying to get hold of a car,’ she said. ‘No luck. Money’s tight. What about you? What about that woman who’s got your kid? Will she loan you a car for a couple of weeks?’
‘She might, but I don’t want to do that,’ I said. ‘I look like enough of a fuck-up already. I can’t have her and her husband thinking I can’t handle myself, or they’ll never agree to increased custody of Jamie.’ I tapped the tabletop with my fork. A thought that had been pushing its way into the back of my brain was now surging towards the front and, try as I might to suppress it, it was demanding to be acknowledged. Sneak seemed to know it. She was watching my face.
‘I have to go see my kid,’ I said. ‘We’ll meet up after that.’
‘You got an idea?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ I sighed. ‘But I really, really don’t want to do it.’