Dark Places

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 wantedbigger 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.”
    The chips hung in cheap snack packs behind the bar.
The chips are really good here
. I had to like the woman for working me so hard. I nodded a yes and soon Krissi was tearing into a bag, the stench of sour-cream-and-onion making my mouth water in spite of its better judgment. Yellow flavoring stuck to Krissi’s bubblegum lipgloss.
    “Anyway, so Ben earned my trust and then started molesting me.”
    “How did he earn your