Chapter 56: Mandy

All in all, I’d watched two hours of the show. Before heading back to the hotel, I slipped into the new van I’d bought under a shell name and waited for Mrs. H to come out to the car I’d seen her arrive in earlier that evening. While I waited, I debated whether this woman would be a reasonable fit for what I needed. Even if she was, could I trust someone who lost control like that on an important job? Seducing the target was the entire point of her being involved in my operation. The one thing in her favor: she didn’t seem to mind. Hell, she clearly enjoyed light BDSM. The target was known to indulge in the same kink, a private vice that fed his contempt for “depraved American sluts.”

When she finally came out, she wore a Fox Hunt Club T-shirt and denim short-shorts. Her hair was wet and slicked back, her face scrubbed clean, though a few dried flecks still clung beneath her ear. I was fairly sure the spankings, slaps, hair-pulling, and biting had left red welts and teeth marks no shower could erase.

Mrs. H climbed into her tired red Chevette. Blue smoke coughed from the tailpipe when she started it. I followed at a safe distance as she eased out of the lot. She took a wandering route, turning again and again. About five minutes in, she switched off her headlights, relying on the orange glow of streetlights. If she was trying to lose a tail or avoid the police, she was doing it wrong. This trick only drew more attention.

Five minutes later, she pulled into a vast abandoned grocery-store parking lot where people parked cars with “for sale” signs in the windshields. The owner was clearly squeezing a few dollars out of the empty building and crumbling lot. I’d done a decent job staying back, anticipating her turns instead of mirroring each one. To anyone else, I was just another set of headlights at one in the morning.

I parked a hundred yards away, killed my lights, and raised the low-light binoculars I’d used earlier. She sat in her Chevette, scanning the darkness. Her hand drifted toward the dome light but never flipped it on. After a minute, she pulled down the visor and stared into the little mirror. Through the magnified lenses, I watched her study herself with the same hollow, hateful stare I’d seen on junkies the day they fell off the wagon, knowing they were about to get high again and hating themselves for it.

I couldn’t tell if she was condemning the coke she’d snorted off some stranger’s cock, the bitter burn mixing with the salty flood, or the thick ropes of cum blasted up her nose and across her glazed face only an hour earlier. After what she decided was enough self-loathing, she nodded once, forced a thin smile, and flipped the visor back up.

Then she stripped off the T-shirt, no bra beneath. The cool night air or the lingering rush kept her nipples diamond-hard. She flicked the left one idly, then reached into the bag on the passenger seat and pulled out the plain white bra she’d stashed earlier. Still bare, she slipped the straps over her shoulders, guided each breast into its padded cup, and snapped the front clasp, trapping those stiff points beneath fabric no strip-club patron would ever see.

She tugged the modest floral dress over her head, worked her arms through, and let it settle. A quick check in the mirror, a tuck of a few damp strands, and she was the perfect suburban mom again. She scanned the lot one last time, hopped out, and walked to the dark blue minivan parked beside the Chevette. She unlocked it with a key. No dome light came on when the door opened. That made it clear she was desperate to keep what she was doing hidden from whatever life the minivan represented.

Mrs. H had gone to elaborate lengths to hide the raunchy, hedonistic creature who’d begged strangers to use every hole on stage. That desperation to keep her double life buried made me certain I could use her. Blackmail is a dirty word. I preferred to call it aggressive recruitment, and she would agree to anything to keep her secret life secret.

I tailed the minivan toward the Greenville suburbs, headlights off, running dark on the half-moon’s glow and the faint red of her taillights. We ended up in Woodford, South Carolina. The houses looked middle to upper-middle class, with well-manicured lawns and landscaping clearly maintained by the husbands, wives, and kids themselves. These weren’t the estates of the upper crust with hired landscapers to maintain their lawns. These were people who took pride in shaping their own property, in a community where beauty wasn’t optional. It was expected.

I stopped short when she turned into a cul-de-sac and pulled into the driveway of a brick two-story with its porch light glowing. All the other houses were dark, the kind of place where, in four or five hours, people would be up drinking coffee, heading to work, or out in their yards. They were living what many would call the American dream: working hard to leave something to the kids, cajoling or beating them into helping maintain it. She didn’t use the garage opener because she didn’t want to wake anyone. She slipped in the front door and killed the light behind her.

If the photos I had taken were any good, I would have everything I needed to blackmail her. Still, my curiosity gnawed at me. Plus, there’s never too much information when blackmail’s on the table. I waited until an upstairs bedroom light threw the curtains into silhouette. If her husband was asleep, why had she been so careful coming in, and then switched on that light? It was the kind of contradiction that made me want more information.