The story so far: While investigating the murder of billionaire CEO Ollie Caroon, homicide detective Ronnie Hurtler is seriously injured by an enraged witness. Meanwhile college student Veronika, who supports herself through a sexcam business, has made contact with Ronnie and is offering him ‘special services’…
CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS CHAPTER:
Self harm, explicit sex work
Gloria the cleaning lady makes no bones about her disgust with Ronnie’s failure to tidy up after himself. “How come you sit here in this nastiness, eh, Ronaldo? Is not manly, all this porquería. Is just icky — repugnante. You never find a nice girl if you bring her back to this pighouse. She run away from here, ‘cause the ambiente is so… how I say it?”
“Offputting?” suggests Ronnie.
“Pinche asqueroso.” She picks up a pizza box containing a sock, a cluster of chickenbones and a dry nest of soiled kleenex. Her gaze is accusatory, probing. Just what the fuck goes on here, exactly?
Ronnie shrugs and unpauses his shooter game. The sparkles of lasers and the sound of rocket explosions erupt once more across the living room. He’s recovering from a life-threatening injury and needs gentle nurturing care, he thinks, not the stern disapproval of some housemaid. He’s a law enforcement hero, decorated for courage in the line of duty, yet he’s being treated like some teenager in need of admonition.
Besides, Gloria has the whole ‘being employed’ thing ass-backward. If he tidied up his place, he would have no need of her help to tidy up for him. So she’d be out of a job. He toys with the idea of saying that she’s convinced him, he’ll restore order to his own life from now on, so she can take off and never come back. But the game has moved on to the final level boss, and soon he’s much too absorbed in the elimination of ancillary mooks to give any further thought to firing Gloria.
As Gloria’s leaving the place, she crosses paths with Abisola the home nurse, who’s come to change his dressings and check on his vitals. They converse in hushed tones in the hallway, exchanging notes on his slovenliness, while he gets creamed by the game’s big bad, a demonic entity with no head. He shuts down the console and hauls himself to his feet.
Now that Abi’s here, he can shower and get the dressing on his neck all soggy, which helps her peel it off. Helps him feel less of a vile monstrosity too. In the shower he toys momentarily with the notion of jacking off, but there’s nothing, no response. It’s the painkillers and the trauma response, he tells himself. If 22-year-old Ronnie could see him now, limp and sexless, unable to get it up even while conjuring up an image of the sexy nurse caring for his open wound, he’d be ashamed. That young man feels entirely inaccessible to him now.
He’s a sexually charged blur of past time, moving intuitively from white line to glass pipe, always fueling up for the next escapade, the next set of teeth biting down on him, the next crossing of a boundary–that boy wanted nothing but fresh, diluted excitement. The mind-altering high coupled with the repeated sexual ecstasy of letting whoever and whatever bring him to never-ending erection. Sometimes when Ronnie looks in the mirror, it’s that hellish young lad he expects to see looking back at him, and the face that greets him in actuality is the stranger. This old, resistant cop body, the baggy bleary detective face–who let this happen? How to get that perverse boyishness back?
Abisola is an immigrant from Africa, and being a home-visit nurse is the best gig she can get right now. Ronnie tells her that it’s better than working in a hospital: they’re dangerous places. Just look what happened to him in a hospital. She gazes at him levelly, then fills him in on the three assaults that she’s had to fend off today.
Apartment cleaned, his body showered, his face shaved, his wound tended by firm solicitous fingers, he feels like an utter gentleman by comparison with the lowlife scum Abi’s describing in her workaday odyssey. Their grasping fingers, their dog-like frottage and all the moist rancid breathing close up in her face.
Ronnie advises her to carry bearspray and a 120-decibel rape alarm. She tells him that her faith in the Lord suffices. And failing that, there’s a surgical scalpel kept handy in her bag which she can use to shank anyone who gets too handsy.
Just as Abi’s checking out, a third visitor is buzzed in: his boss, Captain Justine Jason. He flashes to a little anthropology nugget he’s just picked up from a new friend: the all-powerful triple-goddess of ancient times. The three aspects of womanhood have come to visit him today: Maiden, Mother and Crone. Here comes The Crone.
“Not so disgusting as normal, Ron,” she says by way of greeting. “Congrats on the improved lifestyle. I’ve come to fill you in on the Caroon shooter and the link with the Lowestoft shooting. But actually something else.”
He motions to the armchair opposite his couch and she sits. He plumps up a pillow and settles in for his briefing. It’s short and sweet: nothing. No further sign of the 9mm Glock, the Caroon shooter, the Lowestoft shooter, no indication as to whether or not they are one and the same. No further leads. It’s all stalled to fuck.
“Which brings me to the real reason I’m here, Ron. After all, I could have told you all that with a quick voice mail, couldn’t I? But there’s something more pressing.”
“Lay it on me, Cap,” says Ronnie. “Can I get you a beer, something harder?”
“I’m good, Ron, “ she says. “This won’t take long either, and then I’ll be out of your hair.” She stands, stretches, then walks behind the armchair and leans her hands on it, facing Ronnie.
“It’s about the Caroon doubloons,” she says. “The bitcoin treasure trove. Got any leads?”
He shrugs with feigned exasperation, though he’s given little thought to it. “Not a whisper, skip.”
“Well there’s much interest in this little packet, Ron. You know Beyond Bill?”
“Of course. Everybody knows Bill.”
Bill Simons, chief of the city’s Special Corruption and Crimes Unit. Whispering Bill, the soft-spoken old man who commands the meanest troop of elite cop stormtroopers in the state. “Beyond Bill” Simons, who’s known to go beyond all known guidelines, beyond reasonable force, beyond any sense of proportionality, to get just exactly what he wants.
“Well, Bill and his little death squad have taken a keen interest in that bitcoin wallet. A directive has been issued by the man to his attack dogs: the wallet must be found.”
“Sounds serious.”
“Polly Caroon the widow has announced on the grapevine that she’s raised her reward to ten percent of the total to whoever can put it in her tearful hands.”
“Poor lady. I know she’s quite broken up about her loss.”
“Ron, I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you can’t calculate that ten percent of a billion dollars is one hundred million. But I’m prepared to go fifty-fifty with you, fella.”
She comes around the sofa and sits down next to him, holding his hand. Like they’re 22 again. “That math is even easier: fifty million for you and fifty million for me. You and me, if we were to get our hands on it. Minus a possible payoff for Beyond Bill to keep us from getting our throats slit, his skim ten or twenty, leaving say thirty-forty million apiece. Plenty to be going on with. So I ask you again: are you sure you’ve had no leads as to the private key of the crypto wallet?”
Ronnie shirks her hand. Not 22 anymore, not by any measure. “Not quite sure what a cryptocurrency wallet even is, skipper. But I have a friend I could ask who works in, uh, online commerce.”
He can see she’s already logged into their virtual chatroom, her icon pulsing a pleasant green. Always on time. He would be too if it weren’t for the sickly little urge to delay gratification. Not for her of course, for him. He’s trembling like a kid on a first date.
Veronika has made it clear that the hour starts once she enters the room, so she’s already working on his dime whether he’s there or not. The refusal to offer himself the full hour of her attention, to deny himself the pleasure of their conversation, that’s his own sick little fantasy to contend with. Imp of the perverse. Knowing she’s on the other side of the screen waiting for him, uncaring, makes Ronnie’s blood pump to all the obvious places.
They’ve been chatting for a week now, consistently, while he’s recovering from the ballpoint hole in his neck. Just the chatroom at first, where he spilled forth whatever compulsive words arose from the seedy corners of his psyche while she listened, or really read, passively. Somehow it came to be understood that he’s a cop, that he investigates homicides. There was some chat about his work, indiscreet enough, but to Ronnie a sweet relief, like he imagines a confessional is for Catholics. My sweet debauched confessor.
Then, after a few sessions in which he’d insisted on nothing overtly sexual, she agreed to upgrade to video sessions for an extra fee. And even in these video conversations, he hasn’t once asked her to do any of the things he fantasizes her doing. It’s enough to have her attention so that he might deny himself of it. It’s enough to know all the blood in her body pumps, throbs, heats and cools beneath her skin. I’m a sick fuck, he thinks.
Today, though, he only waits five minutes before entering the chat. He’s got business to take care of prior to the pleasure.
“Ms. Veronika,” he says as her face arrives in its various assorted pixels.
She’s beautiful and bored as always, hair in carelessly chic stacks atop her head, hoodie swathing her body so not a hint of sweet torso skin is revealed to him.
“Please do not call me Ms. How old do you think I am?”
Ronnie takes the question rather seriously. “Twenty four, I’d guess.”
Veronika neither confirms nor denies. “So, what’s up.”
Ronnie scratches the back of his head. He recalls the blackening moments upon the hospital floor while the blood pumped from his neck, how the only thing he’d wished for if he was to die was that Veronika be there to receive the blood in her hands and drink it, to let it spill forth down the valley of her chest as if in some form of ancient ritual. Worshiping something long dead.
She wouldn’t want that of course. No, certainly not.
“I have a query for you, actually.”
“A query,” she deadpans. “Sure, lay your query on me, dude.”
“I imagine,” he says, leaning forward slightly to show he means business, “in your field of work you know a good deal about e-transactions, digital currency, bitcoin and the like.”
She seems surprised, startled even. “Oh. Sure, I wish I didn’t. It’s brain slop tech nerd bullshit but yeah, I have to know a bit about it when half my clients are precisely that vein of brain slop tech nerds.”
Ronnie nods. It’s hard not to be flustered by the hard beauty of Veronika. He’s swollen up with the notion of cracking this wallet open and spending all that dead man moolah on his apathetic honey. His own money has gotten him this far but Veronika is something else, something worth spoiling. The money would be more than just a financial gesture, it’s an offering at her altar, one to show fealty and devotion. If he’s lucky, it might keep her around too.
“So, let me ask you then. If someone went and sealed a large sum of money as bitcoin in an e-wallet, how would one go about accessing said e-wallet. Hypothetically.”
Veronika smirks. “Hypothetically. When it comes to blockchain wallets, you’re gonna have a public key and a private key. The public key is like having a P.O. box. You’re old, I’m sure you know about those.”
“That is correct. But not quite that old.”
“So as long as someone has the address to your P.O. Box they can send you whateverthefuck. But only you, with the private key, can access what is sent to you. In this analogy, the key is a literal key, but for a blockchain wallet it’s a passcode. Like with anything else, you have to keep your passcodes to yourself, otherwise anyone can access your shit.”
Ronnie considers this. “So there’s no way to get into that wallet then.”
“If you have the public key you might be able to trace an IP and do some digging at that IP, see if the private key was stored anywhere digitally.”
“And if you had the private key but not the public key?”
“You’d be a very weird dude indeed. That would be one of those moments when services like private detectives are usually consulted.”
“I’ll try and find one somewhere.”
She grins, more knowingly than he likes. “It’s possible,” she says, “that your guy did store it digitally somewhere. After all, he was one of those brain slop tech nerds.”
Ronnie blinks. “How did you–”
Veronika grows sly and slinky. “Like you said, this bullshit is my business. The news might not be reporting on it, but all the underground servers are lit the fuck up trying to hack into that dead fuck’s wallet.”
“So the public key is known?”
“Fuck yeah, man. Sitting there on the blockchain where it always was. That was never the issue.”
“And the private key? Would it look like an internet password, a string of letters and shit?”
“That’s what it looks like, so I’m given to understand.”
His eyes register this. She registers his registering. He seals his lips tight.
“Now let me query you,” Veronika says, leaning forward. “Is it true that Caroon’s killer shot some other guy on the same day? You must have some idea of who this shooter is by now.”
Ronnie swallows. She’s close enough to the camera now that he can see into the soft dark of her eyes, the subtle pulse at the base of her throat where the skin is smooth and sweet.
“I can’t…”
“Sure you can.” She smiles. “Tell you what – you give me what you know about the suspect and I’ll give you ten minutes where I’ll do anything you ask me to do. Anything.”
A primal switch flicks in his brain, the urge he could not access in the shower. He sees red and everything throbs with an intensity, like a drugless high, a temporal euphoria. This is it, this is how he gets himself back, this is the feeling, for all its horror and perversion, that makes Ronnie feel real. This is the feeling of living–Veronika can give that to him.
“Yes,” he says. “The same gun was used in another shooting the same day. But the witness – the guy who was shot – when questioned about what he saw, got violent with the interrogating officer–”
“–And stabbed him in the neck.”
She’s so close to the camera now, he can practically feel her warm breath on his face. He palms the aching wound in his windpipe. “Yes. And the witness croaked on the spot. So it was the same gun, but we got no confirmation it was the same person.”
Veronika teases her bottom lip with her charmingly uneven teeth. “You don’t think it was the same person?”
“I don’t know,” he answers truthfully. “I think something doesn’t smell right. And that smell is distracting all of us from the truth. There’s too many damn red herrings here. We’re not just going in the wrong direction, we’re going in a dozen wrong directions.”
She sits back and Ronnie exhales — hadn’t realized he was holding his breath.
“You an addict, Ron?”
Left field question — but not the first time he’s been sniffed out. His recovery is admirably swift. “I was,” he answers. “Mostly coke and booze.” And black tar and crack and ayahuasca and speed, anything that makes the world appear different than it actually is, anything that turns the body to shivering gold dust, all flesh and bone liquidated. But he keeps that piece to himself, and especially that just speaking with her sparks that feeling to life inside of him again.
“But you quit,” she says.
He nods. “Just gave it all up one day — ’bout three years now. No therapy, no meetings, no intervention. I just got bored of it all. Every day looked the same. Totally blank, flat, lifeless.”
“Is that what you’re looking for now? Life?” She tugs down the neck of her hoodie slightly to the place where her collarbones rise.
“Something like that,” he says. “Can’t say I quite understand it.”
Veronika hums somewhere low in her throat. Almost as if she’s actually turned on, not faking it. “Well, maybe we can understand it together. Your ten minutes starts now, Ronnie.”
“I wanna see you bleed, V,” he whispers.
“Of course you do.”
Red creeps across his vision once more. He palms the insistent prick through his pants as the thin metal glints like sharp sunlight through the computer screen. It’s been raining for days now.
Veronika stands before the camera, shifting to muffled music Ronnie can’t quite make out. Not the usual driving techno. Something sweeping and orchestral with a chorus of despairing voices going Blut, Blut, and then a sweet girl’s voice lamenting. He’s paying very little attention to those sounds anyhow. His fascination is fixed on the strangled sighs and almost-moans of the woman on the other side of the screen drawing pencil-thin lines of red across the backs of her arms.
I know we’re the same, Ronnie thinks, but cannot speak aloud. Everything caught in his throat like thick wads of desire too overwhelming to cough up. Blood, blood.
He does his own business outside the frame of his camera. Keeping himself decent. Veronika stutters and sways, eyes closed, head thrown back, unblemished neck bared to his tracing eyes. All the life pumping through her. Holy fluids. He doesn’t need the full ten minutes. More tissues deposited on the floor for Gloria to pick up. Shameful residues.
In their final moments together, Veronika seems more solid than she had before. He’d seen this last week when he first offered $500 for their private chat. It’s the inadvertent dropping of the performance. She’s really there on the other side of the screen, truly attentive, though he can’t guess why.
“Hey,” she says. “I’ll look into the blockchain wallet for you. Ask around to find his public key, and do some digging from there. But if I get you good information on that money, Ron, I want some of it.”
They end their chat the moment his hour is up, to the exact second. There were moments there he’d thought maybe Veronika was enjoying herself too, but that’s most likely the delusion of a horned-up older man, nothing more. He’s a wallet to her, like any other wallet. Only his private key ain’t so hard to find. He keeps giving it out freely.
At the kitchen sink, he washes his hands clean of sin. Raw dubstep sound coming up from the interior stairwell. Scrubs and scrubs but feels a stain that cannot be washed out. Cold rain thrumming against the window pane. The longer he scrubs, the more this stench of unholiness rises, the stinging scent of rot.
He shuts off the water and inhales more deeply. Not a metaphorical stench, something very real. The physical stink of rot. Ronnie squats, his knees protesting, and draws open the cabinet door beneath the sink to find a curled-up rat corpse glaring at him with its black marble eyes. The thing had to be newly dead, but somehow looks shriveled and dehydrated from weeks of decay. Bloodless.
He closes the door and stands. Makes a note on the fridge for Gloria to take care of it.
And thinks: Enough of this recovery bullshit. Time to get back to work. Earn your pay, mister working man.
END OF CHAPTER 4 - booty call -
Amateur continues here…
Credits
Rosalía - “Berghain”
Seine Angst ist meine Angst, Seine Wut ist meine Wut, Seine Liebe ist meine Liebe, Sein Blut ist mein Blut
His fear is my fear, his anger is my anger, his love is my love, his blood is my blood
Deekline & Specimen A - “Murderer” (dubstep version of Barrington Levy)
I’m trying not to faint
Oh my god. Fascinating! Poor Gloria!