Lady Midnight by Timothy C. Phillips Page A

what you see, enter your credit card number to see more. Join the site and we’ll go private. Become a premium member. Pay us, you slob. And they did. Night after night, ten million poor slobs put themselves in credit hell forever to see something that they could never touch. And they came back, night after night, time after time. If you couldn’t see the beauty in that, well, you just didn’t like money.  
    Vince had found the goose that laid a big fat golden egg, without fail, every single day. And there was another side to this fabulous coin. They got to shoot their own porn flicks. Short and sweet and straight to the point features that the geeks they dealt with referred to as “content,” and for which they paid thousands of dollars each, without batting a jaded eye. Vince had started his own little video company called Blue Moon Video, and now he and Big Daddy churned out that content for their web-geek customers.  
    These little movies got loaded onto websites that were visited by millions of web surfers per month—tens of thousands per day. Big Daddy still wasn’t clear on just how it all paid, all he knew was, that the checks rolled in to Blue Moon every month, thousands of dollars, completely legal.  
    Big Daddy had adjusted quickly. There was money and booze and drugs and naked girls, and plenty of them, right? So, no problem. At first, he had thought that he was getting a handout and a free ride from his old buddy Vince, just because of old times. But the more he hung around, he realized that Vince was a businessman, despite all the pretty young girls and pool parties. Vince was busy, so busy, in fact, that he needed Big Daddy’s help.  
    The hardest part was realizing that it was all true. And one day, it had hit him. Shangri-La. Like the place in the book that he had felt strangely drawn to in prison. The place he had liked to think about, on those long boring days that seemed to stretch off into forever sometimes, to take him far away from Draper Correctional Facility in his mind. He had found his Shangri-La. Big Daddy’s   heaven on this brutal, bleeding earth was a mansion in Great Neck, an endless supply of liquor, and a big pool out back surrounded by naked broads. Shangri-La was a glass topped-table with nine lines of coke as long as a prison shank, and all the enlightenment he would ever need was a big wad of cash he could slap in the hand of the parole officer, who had shown up once, taken the dough, and obligingly winked and took a major powder, never to be seen again.  
    Some probation file somewhere was being updated on a monthly basis, and that file said Big Daddy was shaping up to be a solid citizen, gainfully employed, thank you very much. And so maybe there really was a Shangri-La for some people, Big Daddy pondered, as he padded out to his waiting poolside deckchair and took a seat in the shade of the big umbrella. And somehow, maybe sitting in that prison cell, he reasoned, he had earned his right to enjoy his version, as long as he was able. He had done his time, now he could take it easy. A topless girl appeared, cinnamon skin glistening from the pool. She put a drink in his hand and rubbed Big Daddy’s neck.  
    Ah.  
    He took a long drink, found it was a Margarita, and decided that he liked it, just fine. He squeezed the girl’s thigh and turned to smile broadly at her.  
    “Shangri-La, baby.”

 
    Chapter 13
     
    I set the box of Connie Patrick’s belongings on the car seat next to me, and lifted off the top. Inside I found a diary, a bible, a small stuffed bear, and a photo album. I opened the diary and skimmed through it, but it was clear from the profusion of entries and the tiny, dense handwriting that I would have to pore over it later.  
    I put the diary back in the box and opened the photo album. The first page featured a picture of Connie and Randy Cross. They were twelve or thirteen, perhaps, smiling into the camera; they both seemed comfortable and happy. I