Page 12 of Spiders in the Grove

“They’re wild,” she says, taking two bottled beers from the fridge. “And inbred.”

“Oh.” I shrug, drop the cat topic, and go back to what I was thinking as I stood outside, before I felt two hundred eyes at my back. “So, this is where you, live, huh?” My eyes scan the tiny trailer, the old beat-up sofa and maroon recliner and twenty-eight-inch flat-screen television; a stack of DVDs sit on the ugly brown carpet beside it.

“Yeah, this is my place,” she says, waving her hand about the room before giving me the beer. “Something wrong with it? You got that judgmental look, babe.”

I take the beer. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” I tell her, and take a swig. “It’s just that I figured fifty-thousand dollars would help you out.” I gave her the money not long ago, after the Francesca Moretti case in Italy.

She smiles, takes a sip.

I follow and sit down with her on the sofa.

“It did help me,” she says. “I paid off a lot of debt. And I bought that car out there; it’s nothing fancy, but it’s dependable. I paid a year in advance rent on this place—I don’t have to worry about rent for a while. That’s always good.”

“But you could’ve bought a place,” I point out; I look around the small area again. “You could’ve bought five or six of these.”

She shrugs. “I had a lot of debt.”

Hmm…

There’s a knock at the door; Jackie sets her beer on the coffee table and goes to answer it just a few feet away. She steps halfway outside, her fingers curled around the door holding it open behind her. I hear faint voices, but only bits and pieces of the exchange.

“This isn’t a good time, Shell,” Jackie whispers, pauses to let ‘Shell’ speak, and then adds: “No, you’ll have to come back later. Yeah, I can get you a cigarette. Hold on.”

Jackie closes the door all the way, and while I pretend to be interested in my fingernails—or lack thereof—she grabs a cigarette from a pack on the kitchen table and takes it outside to the woman.

Drug debt, I answer myself. Why else would a woman who sleeps with men she hardly knows, and who hangs out at sleazy bars every night, and lives in a trailer park in the worst part of town, spend fifty-thousand dollars on anything else other than drugs? I knew she had a drug problem the day I met her—she was doing a line of coke on the bar behind the bartender’s back that night—so, I guess I can’t expect anything else from her. It’s none of my business, anyway. She can do all the drugs she wants, screw whoever she wants, and I’d never think less of her for being who she is. It just surprises me, is all; I had hoped she’d appreciate that money a little more, and do something with it to better her life.

Can’t change a leopard’s spots, and all that. It’s a shame, really, because she’s actually a beautiful woman.

“Sorry about that,” she says, sitting beside me again. “Shellie is kinda nosey; probably saw your classic Mustang out there and wanted to know who’s driving it. Strange, nice cars parked around here has sort of become the big news topic of the trailer park. Probably cops gettin’ ready to raid Carson’s place. He lives in lot twelve; I think he’s running a meth lab over there—so, what’d you want to talk with me about?” She grins, and scoots closer, putting her hand on my thigh. “Probably a stupid question, huh?” She bats her brown eyes.

“Actually, that’s not what I came here about,” I tell her.

A little surprised, Jackie slides her hand from my leg and looks at me with curiosity.

I take another drink, pull a cigarette from my pocket, pop it between my lips and set the end aflame.

This is probably a bad idea—I know it’s a bad idea—but I’m not known for my good ideas, or my good decisions, or—leopard’s spots and all that.

“If you’re interested,” I begin, and take another drag, “I’ve got a job for you.”

“What kind of job?”

“A hard one,” I say, smoke streaming from my mouth. “And I won’t lie to you, or sugarcoat anything—it’s dangerous. But it pays well, and you won’t have to do it alone; if it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure you’ll be fine, but I’m not so sure you can stomach the things you might see being done to other people.”

Her eyebrows harden, and she cocks her head to one side. “Hmm,” she says. “I don’t know, Niklas, you’re not selling me very well. Is there anything about this dangerous, possibly traumatizing job that would make it more…tempting?”

“One million dollars,” I say, and she blinks. “And all of it up-front; none of that half before, half after shit.”

She puts her beer down, stunned, almost missing the table entirely.

“Wow…well, that’s a lot of money”—she’s having trouble finding the right words—“I mean, that’s a good and a bad thing: good, because it’s a lot of damn money; bad, because it means this job, whatever it is, really is dangerous. And you’re willing to give it all up-front? That concerns me even more. So, stop with the suspense already and tell me what it is.”

I spend an hour explaining everything: the dangers of the job and her role in it; the shit she’ll see no matter how hard she tries to avoid it; and by the time I’m done, not even a million dollars can convince her one-hundred-percent. We’re still at around, oh, I’d say, seventy-four.

“Holy shit, Nik,” she says, standing in the room with her arms crossed; she’s been pacing the past fifteen minutes. “I knew—I mean I figured, anyway—you were into some weird stuff; that fifty-thousand you gave me, I always thought it was some kind of blood-money, and I wondered where you got it. I don’t know, I guess I just never expected anything like this.”

“Well, what did you expect?” I’m sitting kicked-back on the sofa, my left boot propped on my right knee.

---