She makes a whatever face.
“You think he likes you?” she says.
Duane shrugs, then sniffs the air.
“Do you smell smoke?” he says.
“The world is on fire.”
He nods. She finishes the bag, crumples it up, throws it over the bed.
“You think he’s dead?” she asks.
Duane shakes his head.
“I think they’re all dead,” says Louise. “Or tortured somewhere in a dungeon.”
“He has a dungeon?”
“He’s a wizard. Of course he has a dungeon. Or maybe just a dungeon room with, like, whips and chains and a dildo iron maiden.”
“Is that where he took you?”
“No, with me he liked the schoolgirl act.”
In the next room what sounds like a mosh pit has started up. It’s 10:30 in the morning. Duane finishes his Coke, crumples the can, shoots for the trash can.
“Nice shot,” she says, as it rattles off the rim.
Duane rubs his eyes. Sleep is coming for him. “You really think he’s dead?”
Louise gets up, goes to the bathroom. She strips off her shirt. “I’m gonna take a shower,” she says, then turns suggestively. “Coming?”
He shakes his head.
“Wow,” she says. “You really are in love.”
She kicks the door closed. Ten minutes later, when she comes out wrapped in a towel that smells like bleach, he is fast asleep on the carpet.
*
They buy a burner phone the next day at the 7-Eleven. Louise has a plan. It came to her in the night. She was in the woods and a woodchuck told her to seek the Troll.
“Really?” Duane asks when she tells him.
Louise laughs, peels off the packaging, slips a sim card into the phone.
“No,” she says. “It came to me on the shitter, but that’s not how these stories are supposed to go, is it, Bilbo? We’re supposed to get a sword from some bitch in a lake, so whatever, a woodchuck whispered the secrets of the universe in my ear, and then we made mad love under a blanket of stars.”
Duane sighs. It’s not that Louise isn’t his absolute favorite person on Earth. It’s just she can be a bit much sometimes, especially after four solid days.
“So who’s the Troll again?” he asks her. “That’s not his real name, is it?”
“Evan? No. He’s just this whatever, rent boy, upturned-collar, pimp motherfucker who deals in high school girls, pills, blah, blah, blah.”
She turns on the phone.
“And you have his number?”
She nods.
“Get this,” she says. “Homeboy calls himself a rabatteur, which is, like, a French word for the guy who leads a fox hunt and beats the bushes and stuff.”
“For what?”
“To drive your prey into the open, Jim. That’s what we were. The prey.”
She enters Evan’s number from memory, all those nights texting back and forth. Part One: the prey is seduced into the open. Part Two: predator eats the prey.
She types.
—You still like it in the ass?
They smoke cigarettes in the parking lot while they wait for a response. The mosh pit boys stumble out around three and pile into a silver Honda.
Her phone beeps.
—Who dis?
She writes back.
—It’s Louise, Romeo.
—Are you in town?
She looks at Duane. He shakes his head.
—Not far.
—What you need? A little DP from a BBC?
—I need some sugar, daddy.
Overhead the sky turns from gray to orange. They can smell the flames surging through the mountains. A police car races by, chased by a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted in the bed, in an inversion of cause and effect. Louise wonders if she played the wrong hand, then— —Sugar daddy is lying low right now, butterfly. Maybe next year.
—baby needs $. baby do anything for $
Duane throws rocks at a dead rat while they wait for him to reply, then— —You still look young? he writes. You know what He likes.
So Louise goes inside and takes a photo of herself in panties, making her most innocent sex-pout, and sends it to him. She knows there’s no universe in which the Wizard is lying low. He is a bottomless pit of sexual debauchery, a ravenous monster, never satisfied. I mean, shit, he fills his veins with the blood of younger men, and has six personal trainers, four chefs, and, like, a cryo chamber in every house. He doesn’t know how to restrain himself. Restraint is for human beings.
She puts her clothes back on, waiting for the chime. Her phone rings instead. She looks at Duane, who raises his eyebrows. Louise answers.