Live Girls Read Online Free PDF

The bulb was covered well and shed only a minimum of light on the small square room. There were four men. They did not look up when Davey entered. They paced back and forth, hands in pockets, heads bent forward. One stopped pacing and quietly leaned against the wall, looking at nothing.

    They all wore dark clothes. One wore a brown hat with fur flaps on the sides which he'd pulled down over his ears. Another wore a fedora pulled forward on his forehead so that it cast a dark shadow over his face. None of them seemed to notice Davey. In fact, they hardly seemed to notice one another.

    They were all silent.

    The other sounds seemed to come from all around them. Davey took another step into the room and listened. Soft sighs, moans, whispers. They were coming from behind the six doors in the room, a pair on each of the room's three walls.

    Across from him on the wall between two of the doors was a sign. He stepped forward and squinted to read it in the poor light:

    INSTRUCTIONS

    — ENTER BOOTH (ONE PERSON ONLY PER BOOTH)

    — INSERT TOKENS IN BOX

    — PANEL WILL RAISE

    — INSERT TIP THRU SLOT BELOW WINDOW FOR SEXY SHOW

    Davey held in a laugh. Insert tip of what through slot? he thought. He looked around at the men again. Each of them had chosen a door and was standing by it. Each seemed to think he was the only person in the room.

    Davey turned away from them and faced the nearest door. Setting his jaw, he took a step forward. I'm here, I'll do it and get it over with . He wrapped a fist around the knob (it was cold and felt a little sticky) and turned it.

    The door burst open and Davey jerked back. He was face-to-face with an old man who looked like a walking corpse: his mouth hanging open like a hole between two sunken cheeks, his eyes deep in their sockets, watery, unfocused, his teeth long and yellow, and his breath — dear God, his breath — hit Davey in a hot, moist wave. Davey had smelled a smell like that once before...

    When he was a little boy. His dog, Brat, a scruffy little mut, had disappeared. Davey had gone out hunting for the dog on a hot summer day.

    He'd found Brat lying beside a narrow side street, his abdomen split open like a melon, small white worms crawling through the remains. The smell that came from Brat's corpse was exactly like the smell that came from the old man's mouth....

    The man brushed past Davey and disappeared down the corridor. Davey stepped into the black hot booth and closed the door behind him.

    Something small scuttled around his feet on the floor and Davey stamped a foot around until the sound stopped with a crunch beneath his shoe.

    The booth was saved from total darkness only by a tiny, blinking red light on the coin box attached to the wall at Davey's right, and by the soft light that shined through what he decided must be the SLOT BELOW WINDOW to which the sign outside had referred. It was in the wall just below a rectangular panel, waist high. It might have looked like a slot at one time, but not anymore. He bent forward and looked at it closely. It had apparently been sort of like a letter slot in a door, but now it was more a rounded hole in the wall, crudely widened by a knife, perhaps, or a jagged piece of metal. Looking at it a bit more closely, Davey had a silly thought, a thought that, at first, made him smile a slight, nervous little smile:

    It looks like it's been chewed open .

    He stood up straight and sighed, regretting ever walking through that black curtained doorway into this dirty little place and wanting to leave as soon as possible. He felt his back beginning to perspire in the stuffy booth and removed his overcoat, folding it neatly over his arm until he bumped his head on a hook mounted on the back of the door behind him. He turned around and reluctantly hung up his coat, then once again turned his back to the door and opened the fist that held those four corpse-gray tokens. One at a time, he dropped them into the slot next to the tiny red