Gillian Flynn - Dark Places

“I’m Colleen,” she said, sucking on the cigarette. The temperature had dropped quickly with the sun, we stood across from each other bouncing up and down to keep warm.

Colleen. It was too sweet a name for a hooker. Someone had once had different plans for this girl.

“How old are you, Colleen?”

She glanced back toward the truck park and smiled, hunched down in her shoulders. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not working there. I work over there.” She pointed to the middle strip club with her middle finger. “I’m legal. I don’t need to …” She nodded back toward the row of trucks, all of them immobile, despite what was happening inside. “We just try to keep an eye out for some of the girls that do work it. Sisterhood thing. You new?”

I’d worn a low-cut top, assuming it might make Krissi more comfortable when I found her, signal I wasn’t a prude. Colleen was looking at my cleavage now with the eyes of a jeweler, trying to match my tits to the correct club.

“Oh, no. We’re looking for a friend. Krissi Cates? You know her?”

“She may have a different last name now,” Lyle said, then looked away toward the highway.

“I know a Krissi. Older?”

“Mid-thirties or so.” Colleen’s whole body was humming. I assumed she was on uppers. Or maybe she was just cold.

“Right,” she said, finishing her cigarette in one aggressive pull. “She picks up some day shifts at Mike’s sometimes.” She pointed to the farthest club, where the neon said only G-R-S.

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“It’s not. But you gotta retire sometime, right? Still it sucks for her, because I guess she spent a lot of money on a boob job, but Mike still didn’t think she was primetime anymore. But at least the boob job was tax deductible.”

Colleen said all this with the perky ruthlessness of a teenager who knew she had decades before such humiliations touched her.

“So should we come back during the day shift?” Lyle asked.

“Mmm. You could wait here,” she said in a babyish voice. “She should be done soon.” She motioned back toward the line of trucks. “I need to get ready for work, thanks for the cigarette.”

She trotted, again with that push of the shoulders, toward the dark middle building, flung the door wide, and disappeared inside.

“I think we should go, this sounds like a dead end,” Lyle said. I was about to snap at him for going chickenshit on me, tell him to just wait in the car, when another shadow climbed out of a truck far back in the line, and began heading toward the parking lot. All the women here walked as if they were pushing against a monstrous headwind. My stomach lurched at a lonely image of me trapped here or somewhere like it. It wasn’t so unlikely, for a woman with no family, no money and no skills. A woman with a certain unwholesome pragmatism. I’d spread my legs for nice men I knew would be good for a few months of free meals. I’d done it and never felt guilty, so how much would it take to find me here? I felt my throat tighten for a second, and then snapped to. I had money coming now.

The figure was all shadow: I could make out a halo of ruined hair, the jutting edges of short shorts, an oversized purse, and thick, muscular legs. She came out of the dark to reveal a tanned face with eyes that were set slightly close together. Cute but canine. Lyle nudged me, gave me a searching look to see if I recognized her. I didn’t but I gave a quick wave just in case and she stopped jerkily. I asked if she was Krissi Cates.

“I am,” she said, her vulpine face surprisingly eager, helpful, like she thought something good might be about to happen. It was a strange expression to see, considering the direction she’d come from.

“I was hoping to talk to you.”

“OK.” She shrugged. “About what?” She couldn’t figure me out: not a cop, not a social worker, not a stripper, not her kid’s teacher, assuming she had a kid. Lyle she only glanced at, since he was taking turns gaping at her or turning almost entirely away from us. “About working here? You a reporter?”

“Well, to be frank, it’s about Ben Day.”

“Oh. OK. We can go inside Mike’s, you can buy me a drink?”

“Are you married? Is your name still Cates?” Lyle blurted.

Krissi frowned at him, then looked at me for explanation. I widened my eyes, grimaced: the look women give each other when they’re embarrassed of the men they’re with. “I got married, once,” she said. “Last name’s Quanto now. Only because I been too lazy to change it back. You know what a pain in the ass that is?”

I smiled as if I did, and then suddenly I was following her across the parking lot, trying to keep out of the way of the giant leather purse that bounced against her hip, giving Lyle a look to pull it together. Just before we got to the door, she ducked against the side of the club, murmuring, you mind? and snuffed something from a packet of foil she pulled from her rear pocket. Then she turned her back entirely to me and made a gargling sound that must have hurt.

Krissi turned back, a broad smile on. “Whatever gets you through the night …” she sang, waggling the foil packet, but partway through the verse she seemed to forget the tune. She snuffed her nose, which was so compact it reminded me of an outie belly button, the kind pregnant women get. “Mike’s a Nazi about this stuff,” she said, and flung the door open.

I’d been to strip clubs before—back in the ’90s when it was considered brazen, back when women were dumb enough to think it was sexy, standing around pretending to be hot for women because men thought it was hot if you were hot for women. I guess I hadn’t been to one this low-rent though. It was small and filmy, the walls and floors seemed to have an extra wax coating. A young girl was dancing gracelessly on a low stage. She marched in place, actually, her waist rolling over a thong two sizes too small, pasties waffling over nipples that pointed outward, walleyed. Every few beats she would turn her back to the men, then bend over and peer at them through her spread legs, her face going quickly red from the flood of blood to her head. In response, the men—there were only three of them, all in flannel, hunched over beers at separate tables—would grunt or nod. A massive bouncer studied himself in the wall mirror, bored. We sat down, three in a row at the bar, me in the middle. Lyle had his arms folded, his hands in his armpits, trying not to touch anything, trying to look like he was looking at the dancer without really looking at her. I turned away from the stage, wrinkled my nose.

“I know, right?” Krissi said. “Goddam armpit of a place. This is on you, right? Because I have no cash.” Before I even nodded she was ordering herself a vodka and cranberry, and I just asked for the same. Lyle got carded, and as he was showing the bartender his ID, he started doing some uncomfortable impersonation, his voice going even more ducklike, a weird smile pasted to his face. He made no eye contact, and gave no real signal that he was doing an impersonation. The bartender stared at him, and Lyle said, The Graduate. You seen it? And the guy just turned away.

So did I.

“So, what do you want to know?” Krissi smiled, leaned toward me. I debated whether to tell her who I was, but she seemed so disinterested I decided to save myself the trouble. Here was a woman who just wanted company. I kept glancing at her breasts, which were even bigger than mine, tightly packed and well trussed so they poked straight out. I pictured them under there, shiny and globular like cellophaned chicken.

“You like ’em?” Krissi chirped, giving them a bounce. “They’re semi-new. Well, I guess they’re almost a year now. I should have a birthday party for them. Not that they’ve helped me here. Fuckin’ Mike keeps screwing me on shifts. It’s OK though, I always wanted bigger boobs. And now I have them. If I could only get rid of this, is what I need to get rid of.” She grabbed at a minimal fat roll, pretending it was much worse than it was. Just beneath it, the white glint of a caesarian scar snaked out.

“So, Ben Day,” she continued. “Red-headed bastard. He really fucked my life up.”

“So, you maintain you were molested by him?” Lyle said, leaning out from behind me like a squirrel.

I turned around to glare at him, but Krissi didn’t seem to care. She had the incuriosity of the drugged. She continued to speak only to me.

“Yeah. Yeah. It was all part of his satanic thing. I think he’d have sacrificed me, I think that was the plan. He’d have killed me if they hadn’t caught him for, you know, what he did to his family.”

People always wanted their piece of the murders. Just like everyone in Kinnakee knew someone who’d screwed my mom, everyone had suffered some close call with Ben. He’d threatened to kill them, he’d kicked their dog, he’d looked at them really scary-like one day. He’d bled when he heard a Christmas song. He’d shown them the mark of Satan, tucked behind one ear, and asked them to join his cult. Krissi had that eagerness, that intake of air before she started talking.

“So what happened exactly?” I asked.

“You want the PG or R version?” She ordered another round of vodka and cranberry and then called out for three Slippery Nipple shots. The bartender poured them, pre-made, from a plastic jug, raised an eyebrow at me, asked us if we wanted to start a tab.

“It’s fine, Kevin, my friend’s got it,” Krissi said, and then laughed. “What’s your name anyway?”

I avoided the question by asking the bartender how much I owed, paid it from a fan of twenties so Krissi knew I had more money. Takes a mooch to catch a mooch.

“You’ll love these, like drinking a cookie,” she said. “Cheers!” she raised the shot up with a screw-you gesture toward a dark window in the back of the club, where I guessed Mike was sitting. We drank, the shot sitting thick in my throat, Lyle making a whoo! noise like it had been whiskey.

After a few beats, Krissi readjusted a boob and then pulled in another big gulp of air. “So, yeah. I was eleven, Ben was fifteen. He started hanging around me after school, just always watching me. I mean, I got that a lot, I always got that. I was always a cute kid, I’m not bragging, I just was. And we had a lot of money. My dad—” here I caught a flicker of pain, a quick wrinkle of her lip that exposed a single tooth—“he was a self-made man. Got into the videotape industry right at the start, he was the biggest videotape wholesaler in the Midwest.”

“Like, movies?”

“No, like blank tapes, for people to record stuff on. Remember? Well, you probably were too young.”

I wasn’t.

“Anyway, so I was kind of an easy target maybe. Not like I was a latchkey kid or anything, but my mom didn’t keep the best eye out for me all the time, I guess.” This time a more obvious look of bitterness.

“Wait, why are you here again?” she asked.

“I’m researching the case.”

Her mouth drooped down at the corners. “Oh. For a second I thought my mom sent you. I know she knows I’m here.”

She clicked long, coral nails on the counter and I hid my left hand, with its stumped finger, under my shotglass. I knew I should care something about Krissi’s homelife but I didn’t. Well, I cared enough not to tell her that her mom was never going to check up on her.

One of the patrons at one of the plastic tables kept peeling off glances at us, looking over his shoulder with a drunk pissiness. I wanted to get out of there, leave Krissi and her issues behind.

“So,” Krissi began again. “Ben was really sneaky with me. He’d, like … you want some chips? The chips are really good here.”