Rain Will Come - Thomas Holgate Page 0,1

magazine and VHS collections I see.”

Czarcik wasn’t the least bit offended she might believe he was eligible for social security. Although he was on the wrong side of fifty, he knew that were it not for his salt-and-pepper sideburns and whalebone-colored goatee, he could easily pass for ten years younger. A daily regimen of weightlifting and jogging kept his body as toned and tight as it was the day he graduated from the Chicago Police Academy as a fresh-faced twenty-three-year-old. But inside his body, where Father Time was allowed to wreak havoc unencumbered by efforts made in the spirit of vanity, years of hard living had taken their toll. Common sense, on which Czarcik prided himself, would dictate that thirty years of smoking, heavy drinking, and the occasional (OK, let’s be honest here, frequent) snort would eventually culminate in one massive coronary. The only question was when. But questions involving his own mortality didn’t much interest Paul Czarcik.

The episode ended. Another hopeful model was sixty minutes closer to her lifelong dream. Candy finished her cigarette and said, “Listen, I know you probably didn’t get your money’s worth, but I have another client.”

“No, no. I enjoyed our time together.”

Candy stood up and adjusted her miniskirt. She smoothed down her blouse. Her outfit was classy trashy, such that the quintessential strict movie dad might say, “Young lady, you don’t think you’re going out in that?”

She picked up the hundred-dollar bills left on the table near the door. She straightened them out and fanned them, poker-player style, for Czarcik to see.

“It’s all there,” he assured her.

“No, it’s . . . it’s way too much.”

Czarcik snubbed out his cigarette in the flimsy tin ashtray lying on the bed next to him. That was one thing he loved about the Wishing Well Motor Lodge. Those cheap ashtrays. It reminded him of the good old soot-covered days when he was still forced to work with a partner and a perpetual cloud of tobacco smoke clung to the station’s fiberboard ceiling tiles. “You earned it.”

Candy held her tongue and pocketed the cash. As much as she wanted to inquire about this unnecessary generosity, she didn’t want to anger him, even if he didn’t seem like the type to give her a flaccid-penis rating on the Ecstasy Escorts website. If she received too many limp-dick icons, that bitch Charlotte would move her profile to a back page and lower her rate. The last time that happened, the only clients she managed to attract were college kids—who never tipped—and junkies banking on the off chance she carried and was in a sharing mood.

Sometimes Candy thought she should have been a shrink. With little prodding, complete strangers would reveal to her the most intimate details of their lives. She had no illusions. Part of it was just the nature of the job; men became strangely forthcoming between a pair of soft young thighs. But the other part was specific to her, not her vocation. She had a face that engendered trust, sometimes to her detriment. Because if Candy had learned anything, it was that men wanted their vulnerability rewarded. When it wasn’t, they usually showed just how mean they could become.

This one was tougher to read, even if she could somehow account for his lack of sexual desire. He wasn’t awkward or nervous as so many of them were. On the contrary, sitting there, cigarette dangling from his lips, he oozed arrogance. She remembered an old movie she had once seen called Risky Business. Not since she’d watched the antics of the movie’s star—with his Ray-Ban sunglasses and megawatt smile—had she seen anyone acting so effortlessly cool.

Czarcik had been reading Candy as well—from the moment he had disengaged the chain and ushered her into the room. Her accent was specific. Appalachia, most likely just west of the Blue Ridge Mountains near the Tennessee state line. She had grown up poor, but not dirt poor, and did not suffer any chronic affliction that would have pointed to her basic nutritional needs not having been met as a child. Although she had had no orthodontic work done (her top canines slightly overlapped her lateral incisors—easy to correct with braces), her cavities had not gone neglected. However, the fillings were silver amalgam, not composite resin, which suggested a free clinic, the only places that continued to use the cheaper, potentially toxic material.

This pervasive habit of Czarcik’s was so ingrained, so instinctual, that when Candy had looked at him for the first time, he