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Benjy came to me on the fourth night and asked, “You got anymore medicine, Lou?”
“Did she take it?” I asked excitedly.
“Yeah… I think you were right. She wasn’t doin’ too good, and then when she took the medicine, she did a whole lot better. She was a whole lot happier and talked a lot more. And she said she wanted to get some more, but she couldn’t get it from Jasmine or the other girls, so she asked if I could maybe get her some.”
That made sense. Before Venus came back to work, Jack had officially put word out that anybody who gave her blow – strippers or Riders – would be answering to him personally.
Luckily for her, I was ignoring the order.
“Great,” I said, and pulled a few baggies out of my inside jacket pocket. “I want you to leave the club for an hour, and when you get back, tell her you got some medicine from a guy you know.”
“Why do I gotta leave?” he asked, confused.
“To make it look like you got it from somebody out in Richards somewhere.”
“But I got it from you.”
JESUS H. CHRIST. “Just do what I tell you, and if she asks where you got it, you say a friend of yours named John.”
“Can I say Barney? I have a friend named Barney. He’s not in the Midnight Riders, but – ”
“Tell her Charlie fuckin’ Chan for all I care. But don’t tell her – or anybody else – that you got it from me, you hear?”
“Okay…”
“When she uses that, come back and see me. Did she talk to anybody on the phone yet?”
“No.”
“Alright… let me know when she does.”
99
So began the long, slow decline of Venus the stripper.
I can’t say I blame her. She was an addict to begin with, and now she was cooped up in a shitty motel room all day with a retard. It’d drive anybody to drugs.
She gave Benjy money first, since she was under the impression that he was having to pay for the shit.
I gladly took the cash. It was the least she could do to compensate me for all my trouble.
In return, I gave Benjy the best stuff I could find. And plenty of it, too. I had Peanut making massive supply runs for me every week to LA.
But then I started cutting her night hours and putting her on daytime – which was a graveyard for business. I was starving her for cash.
The next couple of days, Benjy only had half the normal amount of money… so I only gave him half the normal amount of coke.
She didn’t say shit the first week, but the second, she finally got over her fear of me and came into my office. She was looking rough around the edges. Twitchy and haggard.
“Why are you knocking me off the schedule?” she demanded.
I fixed her with a cold stare. “You mean, why am I running my business the way I want to run it?”
“This is bullshit, Lou – I’m not making anything on the day shift!”
I stood up from my desk and walked around to her. She actually shrank back, her eyes full of terror, as I leaned down and whispered in her ear.
“No, what’s bullshit is that I find out you were trying to fuck me behind my back, but because of Jack Pollari, I don’t get to have Eyeball and the boys pull a train on your ass before I slit your fuckin’ throat. So next time you want to whine about being treated unfairly, go bitch about it to somebody you didn’t try to narc on, you goddamn fucking whore.”
