“Let you go? Hell, this ain’t Russia. We have laws here. Procedures that have to be followed. You think you can just talk your way out of paying your debt to society?” He bobbed his head for a moment, like he was agreeing with someone somewhere, some words the woman couldn’t hear. Then he turned to her. “So,” he said, “a dog-face like you would probably be pretty grateful for a chance to suck cock, don’t you think?”

“Oh God,” she murmured. She tried to squeeze herself away from him, which was what they did, but there was nowhere to go. This was the backseat of a Ford LTD, for Christ’s sake. But that’s what they did. They tried to get away.

Doe loved this part. They were so scared, and they’d do whatever he said. And they loved it, too. That was the crazy thing. He knew they’d be getting off on remembering it. Sometimes he got phone calls late at night- hang-ups- and he knew what was going on. It was women he’d had in the back of the cruiser. They wanted some more, they wanted to see him again, but they were also embarrassed. They knew they weren’t supposed to want it. But they did. All this Oh God, no-ing was just part of a script.

The truth was that it also made him a little bit sad on Jenny’s account, because she was probably going to end up a dog-faced whore like this one. His own daughter, a dog-faced whore. In high school she’d be sucking dick in the bathroom because that would be the only way she’d get boys to like her, which they wouldn’t, but it would take her a couple of years of getting smacked around to figure that out. He knew a couple of high school girls like that right now. He felt bad for them and all, but there wasn’t much to be done about it, so there was no point in avoiding their company, now, was there?

And here was Lisa, squirming, crying, wiggling like a toad under a shovel. Meanwhile, he had a telephone pole in his pants. He unzipped himself and pulled it out. “Look at that, Lisa. You look at that. Now, you be a good girl and do your job, and we’ll see what we can do about dropping the charges. Be a good girl, we’ll have you back in your car in fifteen minutes. Quarter hour from now, you’ll be cruising down the highway, heading back to Miami.”

That always helped. You give them something real to hold on to, put them in the future. Just get it over with, and they could go. Which they could. He wasn’t a monster or anything.

He saw that he had her. She turned to him slowly. Her little piggy eyes were red and narrow and pinched with fear, but he saw something like hope there, too. That grim determination to suck and bear it. And the twinkle in her eye, like she knew she was lucky to have a man like Jim Doe force himself on her. Maybe this wasn’t how she’d always dreamed of it, but she’d dreamed of it just the same.

“Okay,” she whispered. Softly. To herself, mostly, he guessed. She had to get herself together. Why, he didn’t know. She’d sucked cock before. And if some pretty little thing locked him in a backseat and told him to eat her pussy, you wouldn’t see Doe having to talk himself into it. But he supposed everyone was different.

“Okay,” she said again, this time more to him. “You’ll let me go?”

“I told you I would,” Doe said urgently. With all this talk he was losing his momentum, starting to get soft. “Now get to sucking, girl.”

“Okay,” she said again. “But you have to take off my cuffs, first.”

“Nice try, Lisa.”

“Please,” she said. “They hurt. I’ll be good.”

I’ll be good. Like she was a little kid. Well, why not? He’d done it before. Sometimes they just needed to feel a little easy, and he knew this girl wasn’t going to get all funny on him. She was broken.

“All right, sugar,” he said. “But nothing tricky. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

He reached around and unlocked her cuffs, wincing at the sound of the click and then the girl’s sigh of relief.

“Thank you.” She sniffed in a big honking snort of boogers, which he didn’t much like, since who wanted to get head mixed with a mess of snot? But fuck it, he reasoned.

“Now I done something for you,” he said. “I think you owe me a little favor.”

His first thought was that she was coming in a little fast. His second was, Holy Christ! The fringes of his vision went red with agony, the unbearably sharp, but also dull, thud of pain in his balls that spread like an electric alien fungus to his hips and down his thighs and up his spine. And then again. It hurt so much that he couldn’t even make sense of it. Somewhere in the back of his mind he understood. She was punching him in the balls. Not just punching him, pummeling him. Wind up and release like a rocket.

He tried to back away from her, out the door, but his back was to the car seat, and in the thud, thud, thud of her fist against his ’nads, he was in a free fall of pain, up became down, left became right. He couldn’t figure out which way to go. Instead, he started to reach for his gun.

On some level he knew that shooting her in the back of his LTD with his dick out, on his own property, when who knew how many people had seen him stop her, and with her car still sitting by the side of the road, was a bad idea. On the other hand, he had this vague notion that if he could put a bullet in her stupid ugly face, she would stop and the pain would be gone. The pain was somehow linked to her being alive. It didn’t make sense, and he even knew it didn’t make sense, but he didn’t care.

The problem was that he didn’t have the gun. Everything was hazy and distorted, and he was feeling around for his belt, but he couldn’t find it. The other thing was that while the pain was still there, the thudding had stopped. That was an improvement.

But not much. Lisa had managed to get his belt off him, the tricky fucking whore, so she had his keys, his nightstick. And she had his gun. The pain heaved back and forth below his waist, and he hoped to Christ she hadn’t crushed his balls. The horizon shifted, and he understood that he was on his side in the back of the seat. She was standing in front of him, the car door open, her T-shirt disheveled and wet from tears or perspiration, her hair all wild like some crazed fuck bunny in a porn movie.

“You goddamn prick,” she said.

The gun was pointed at him, which he didn’t like, but even in his agony he could see that she didn’t know how to hold a gun- she had it in both hands like a cop on some dumb-ass show. If he had to guess, he’d say she’d never fired one, probably hadn’t taken the safety off. Not that he wanted to take the chance she’d figure it out if she needed to, since she’d already proved herself clever. Still, she might be the cleverest ugly bitch in the world, but if he’d been able to move his body below his waist, he would have gotten up, taken that thing away from her, and broken her potato of a nose with it. That’s what he would have done.

“You wanted to know what I do for Channel Eight. I’m a reporter, you asshole. Get ready for camera crews.”

She kicked the door shut, trapping him into the back of his car.

The smell of pig shit from the waste lagoon washed over him like an insult, like a big ugly laugh, like a tax audit, like a dose of VD. Doe was trapped. He was in pain. His balls were smashed. The Yoo-hoo and bourbon churned menacingly in his stomach and then came up onto the seat, onto his chest, his face, his arms. He felt himself passing out, and he stayed passed out until the next morning when his deputy finally found him and woke him with a series of delicate and mocking taps of his nightstick against the window.