Lady Midnight by Timothy C. Phillips

you don’t mind, I’m going to visit with some of my talent, in this very building here. And I promise you, if you lay hands on me again, you’ll regret it.”  
    With that the sweaty, chunky man moved cautiously away. I stood there on the sidewalk, slightly stunned at what he had just told me. How could they let a monster like Big Daddy out of prison? Prisons had been invented for people just like him.  
    Once again, I felt like my hand was a couple of cards short. I didn’t like Vince and Big Daddy showing up in the current mess. I didn’t like the timing, and the placement was all wrong. Suddenly it dawned on me that Vince was going into Nookie’s building, and everything fell into place with crystal clarity.  
    Vince and Big Daddy were in the porn business, and Nookie Uberalles was working for them. She was the “talent” that Vince had been referring to, which meant one thing: Vince and Big Daddy knew Constance Patrick, too. Suddenly I felt that Vince had been right, and I was very far behind the times, indeed.

 
    Chapter 12
     
    Since Big Daddy had been in prison, wonderful things had happened. Sure, Communism had ended, and all that stuff, but he didn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that. Politics and world affairs didn’t matter to him. No, other stuff had happened, stuff that had affected him in a very real and positive way, something that he could never have foreseen affecting him in the least—but it had.
    The Internet had happened.  
    Vince had once worked for him. Vince, his old buddy and muscle that he used to send around to collect on late loan payments. Since Big Daddy had been inside, Vince had grown a brain. While Big Daddy had gone down for five to twenty-five after they had dosed a hooker with some too-pure heroin and the bitch had died, Vince had gotten off with probation. He bought a computer when the Internet was just starting out. It seems he’d had some latent talent. Vince had quickly understood what few could grasp in the beginning days, that the Internet was going to be the place where people made money. Millions, billions, trillions of sweet dollars were waiting out there in the form of Ones and Zeroes.  
    True, you couldn’t ship smack or deliver a hooker over the phone lines, the cables, or the airwaves that this new medium of communication depended on for its existence. So what could you sell over the Internet? Porn, in all its various and wonderful forms. Vince had understood that, and the beauty of it was, he had correctly surmised that other people would understand it, too. You see, you could sell a hooker to a million guys at once through a computer. You could sell your old lady to them, every night, and plenty of people did, and nobody had to touch anybody; the girls never even had to see the faces of these virtual Johns.  
    A girl sits in a booth in Munich, in Bangkok, in Los Angeles, in Buenos Aires, in Atlanta, and maybe she’s in college and needs the dough, or maybe she’s got a little habit she can’t kick, whatever, because all she has to do is put on some lingerie and a smile and lay on a bed and stare into a web cam, and all over the world in lonely rooms lonely men with no confidence, or husbands with secret needs or pimple-faced kids with hearts beating fast stare back at the girl on the screen and take part in the oldest hustle in the world, one that’s been going on since nervous husbands followed the footprints of whores in Ancient Rome who had the come-on in Latin, “Follow me” engraved on the bottoms of their sandals so prospective customers could literally follow the trail to what they were looking for. It was an old racket, even then.  
    The guy on the Internet doesn’t get the payoff, though. He pays and pays and pays, but he never even gets laid. It’s a tease that never ends. The poor slob goes into a video chat room and sees a hot girl in lingerie, and begs and begs to see some skin, until finally the girl tells him, well, if you like