Poison Shy Read Online Free

right. I’m friendly, see? You’ve woken me up and I don’t mind. Are you looking for a date, honey?”
    I admitted that I was and gave her my address. She said she’d be over in half an hour, she just needed to shower. I tried not to think about what that could mean.
    After precisely half an hour — I’d been watching the clock — Suzie still hadn’t shown up. I opened a beer and drank it down in three or four big gulps. I felt the stirrings of panic in the back of my skull. It occurred to me that I should call her back and cancel.
    As soon as I picked up the phone, however, someone buzzed my apartment.
    â€œYeah?” I said into the intercom, trying to sound both casual and confident.
    â€œIs this Darcy’s place?”
    I pinched my eyes shut. It was difficult to remain standing, to support my own body weight. “Uh, yes it is. Is this Suzie?”
    â€œIt sure is, honey. You wanna buzz me in?”
    I thought about throwing on some pants and a T-shirt as I waited for her to come up the stairs, but decided it didn’t matter. I’d just hired a prostitute for the first time in my life. Did I really need to be concerned about making a decent impression?
    She reached the top of the stairs and knocked. I could smell her perfume through the door. I swept all my doubts into some far-off, cobwebbed corner of my conscience and turned the handle, half-expecting to be confronted by my father’s ghost, or Medusa, or Jesus Christ Himself. Instead I saw a woman with curly red hair and large freckled breasts that were straining to burst out of her little black dress. She smiled at me with a mouth covered in red lipstick. A layer of wrinkles appeared at the corners of her eyes.
    â€œHey there.” She stepped inside, heels clicking on the hardwood floor. Her mauve-painted toenails were cracked and unusually long. She looked me up and down. “You look like you’re ready to get down to business.”
    She looked to be in her early fifties. Older than I expected, but I was so full of alcohol, so pathetically horny, that I found myself obscenely attracted to the idea of fucking her.
    She asked for the money up front. Eighty bucks, a bit lower than I had thought. She slipped out of her dress and exposed her enormous, water-balloon breasts. Her thighs were full of bruises and cellulite, her kneecaps covered in scabs. She performed oral sex on me while I sat on my mattress and stared blankly at an infomercial for a vacuum cleaner with state-of-the-art sucking technology. I tried to conjure up a mental image of Melanie’s face, but it kept morphing into Patricia’s — the only other face I’d ever seen between my legs. I stared up at the ceiling and concentrated on finishing the job as quickly as possible.
    When we were done, she asked to use my bathroom. I could hear her vomiting into the toilet. She came out reeking of perfume and handed me her business card, a shot of her much younger self straddling a stripper pole. I watched out my window as she got into a cab and drove off to wherever.
    I felt dirty. I felt alone. I opened a bottle of whisky and drank myself to sleep.

2
    I never paid much attention to clients’ households. Whatever mess they left lying around — dirty laundry, credit card statements, pornography — my job was to come in, wipe out whatever vermin was making their lives miserable, and leave. There was no judgment involved, no snooping around. No scoffing at old family portraits or clever rearrangement of fridge magnets. The private lives of Frayne were about as interesting to me as the breeding habits of the common crayfish.
    One time, when I was working with a guy named Ansel, we were called in to take care of a cockroach problem at the apartment of one of our frequent clients, Gottfried Burl. Mr. Burl was the owner of a breakfast diner called Egg on Yo’ Face. It had been featured on one of those restaurant makeover