Last Woman Standing

In my giddy state, I had to stifle a laugh. Yanked was the appropriate word in my case. “Yeah, I know what that feels like.”

“He gave me his card, though. With his direct line. Maybe I’ll get out to L.A. this year after all, while he still remembers who I am.” She laughed shortly.

I didn’t trust myself to answer. The urgency of warning Kim and unburdening myself had passed, and I was now consumed by the desire to see Amanda. Maybe I would still tell Kim about Neely—but later, after I found out what was really going on. In the meantime, she was in no danger of being trapped in a back seat by him any time soon.

And me? I was going to the ball.

5 (#ulink_96044f18-cb49-5e7a-bb21-5140d5b3670d)

I begged off shows for the evening and stayed home to watch TV and monitor my cell phone obsessively, waiting for Amanda to contact me. Around one o’clock in the morning, just as I was drifting off, a text woke me up.

Come over. With an address.

Before I was fully awake, my thumbs started moving in a reply. Then I glanced at the address again and stopped typing. It was somewhere downtown—not exactly where I would have expected Amanda to want to meet at one in the morning on a Saturday. Maybe a degree of caution was in order. I typed, Just checking, who’s this?

It’s me. I have something to show you.

Show me?

A link to a video appeared in the next text. If this was some creep from Tinder or a heckler stalking me . . . but I was getting paranoid. I checked out the thumbnail, squinting and bringing the screen close to my eyes. Most of the picture was covered by the play arrow, but behind the triangular icon, I could just make out a familiar face.

I followed the link.

At first it was hard to tell what was going on. The screen was a grainy blur of bad lighting and beige walls. There was a knock and a lot of rustling and thumping, and then the beige went the color of a bruise as a door opened. The dark outline of a bald guy appeared in the doorway, backlit by a ceiling fixture that temporarily flooded the frame with white glare before receding again behind the figure’s head.

“Come in, come in,” the silhouette said in a muffled but familiar voice, and there was more rustling as he stepped back into what appeared to be a hotel room. He was wearing a bathrobe.

Next came a woman’s voice that I recognized as Amanda’s, much louder, presumably because it was closer to the mic. “Where would you like me to set up the table, Mr. Neely?” The camera moved forward into a spacious hotel suite, and Neely disappeared from the frame temporarily.

“Let me get the—” Sound of a door closing. “Next to the bed, please. Thank you. Do you need any help with that?”

The camera moved jerkily through the suite toward the king-size bed. Amanda’s voice came through her heavy breathing, as if she was carrying something large. “No, thanks, I’ve got lots of practice.”

“Of course.” Neely’s voice sounded nervous and tinny off camera. “It’s a big table, ha-ha.” The screen went black for a moment and there was a clacking sound. Neely’s voice in the background said, “You sure you don’t need anything? How about a glass of water?”

“A glass of water would be nice,” Amanda said. The picture came back, veered wildly for a moment, then settled into an angle and stayed there. A strip of white appeared at the bottom of the frame, out of focus, as if the camera was sitting on a bedspread. In the middle of the frame, a thin, tall woman in a red polo shirt was visible from the shoulders down setting up a massage table. When she bent over to tuck in the sheets and adjust the legs, she was careful to turn her face away from the camera, revealing the back of a red baseball cap and a flash of wavy blond hair.

Neely came back into the frame, also cut off from the shoulders up, carrying a glass of water, which he handed to Amanda. “Thank you,” she said. “And now I’ll just step into the other room, Mr. Neely, and if you could just disrobe and lie face-down under the sheet. I’ll knock when I’m coming back in to make sure you’re ready.” As she spoke, she walked out of the frame with the water, her voice growing fainter until the last few words were swallowed by the click of a door closing.

“Great,” Neely called in a loud, somewhat strangled voice. He fumbled with his bathrobe, still headless and partially blocked by the massage table, and the robe opened, revealing a massive, hairy chest flushed nearly brick red. Letting the robe fall open but not taking it off completely, he swung one hammy thigh up on the massage table, then the other, something unmistakable flopping between them.

Even I, who had seen Neely’s fat red worm of a penis in uncomfortably close quarters, couldn’t suppress an involuntary gasp at the intimacy of all that naked flesh. The left robe flap rode farther up as he wriggled into position, exposing one fleshy white buttock squished flat on the table and a deeply creased overhang of white side belly covered with straggling hairs. He reclined back, leaned onto his left elbow, bent his right leg into a triangle for stability, and tilted his lap a few degrees toward the camera, almost as if posing for it, though it was obvious he didn’t know it was there. Last of all, his face appeared: a giant moon shape, dappled and flushed, with an expression that was at once anxious, eager, and revoltingly childlike.

My stomach flipped over as his features became fully visible to the camera eye, surreally recognizable, like all celebrity faces. Once that face was onscreen, juxtaposed with that body—all in dramatic close-up and lit with improbable artistry by a bedside lamp—I could almost feel the shock waves rippling through some invisible crowd, as if the video had already gone viral and I was only a single viewer among millions.

From the background came a quiet knock. “I’m coming in, Mr. Neely,” said Amanda from offscreen in her gentle, breathy massage-therapist voice. “Are you ready?”

“Ready,” he replied, dick in hand.

The video ended. It was less than three minutes long. I stared in shock. I had almost forgotten where I was and that I was alone.

A text came, reminding me that I wasn’t alone at all. Not anymore.

You can probably guess where it goes after that.

Then: Trust me now?

I grabbed my keys.

Downtown on a Saturday night at last call was never my favorite place to be, and tonight was no exception. The days of stumbling down a piss-soaked stretch of Sixth Street with Jason and a couple of comedy buddies drunkenly mocking the drunk girls in platform heels and micro-minis who tripped over the curbs were long past. Now I felt that anyone who chose Austin’s miniature version of the French Quarter, cordoned off on weekends to create a dreamscape of hammered pedestrians, tour buses, and Bible-wagging street preachers, was equally perverse. After paying what I felt to be sufficient dues at the notoriously rough open-mic at Fondue Freddy’s, I’d avoided downtown clubs whenever possible.

The dreamscape was in full effect tonight. Though the Red River venues had quieted after midnight, per city ordinance, the bar bands and jukeboxes of Sixth Street still sent out a soup of clashing beats audible several blocks away. Taxis, their windows rolled down to air out the sodden drunks inside, blared world music at every stoplight; even the loaded pedicabs emitted strains of jam bands and hair metal, rhythms to keep their stoned drivers mashing the bicycle pedals. I had no trouble finding a place to park; there were never enough cabs and always plenty of drunks vacating their parking spots at this time of night. Eager to avoid sharing the streets with them, I took the first open spot I saw and walked toward the address Amanda had given me.

As I approached, I recognized the area, an urban living district whose paved pedestrian walkways were lined with olive oil boutiques and manicure places I could afford only with a gift card. Just a few blocks from the squalid circus of Sixth Street, it looked like a different world. Amanda’s building had gone up before I left, during the first big tech boom. Its copper siding had at first been visible from almost any part of town, a blinding pinkish-gold beacon in daylight. In the five years I had been away, the siding had tarnished to the respectable auburn of a Lincoln penny, but it still looked like money to me. The single people I knew lived in rundown student apartments—mine was a converted nudist compound from the sixties whose walls always felt uncomfortably moist—or divvied up dilapidated cottages in the five-year floodplain. I wondered just how Amanda paid the rent here, her own tech job more than a year gone. The security guard buzzed me in without looking up, and I took the elevator to the eighth floor and knocked.

Amanda opened the door in a T-shirt the mottled-gray color of botched laundry, looking not just wide awake, but wired. Without a word, she waved me in, and I stepped past a narrow kitchen with a granite bar. The living room, half swallowed by the black night outside the curtainless floor-to-ceiling glass windows, was just large enough to hold an entertainment system and an L-shaped sectional sofa. Everything was in perfect order, from the coordinating throw pillows to the perfectly straight rows of Blu-rays on the shelf above the TV—mostly rom-coms and action movies, to my surprise. Outside, a wraparound balcony glowed with a ghostly concrete pallor, and the pale pink limestone of the capitol’s dome reared up in the distance.

She shut the door behind me. “Amanda—” I said, but she was already talking.

“Shall we celebrate?” she said. “I have some nice wine I’ve been saving. I wish I had champagne.”

“But how—”

“Neely’s gone for good.” Her back to me, she rummaged through the cabinets in the narrow kitchen, calling over her shoulder, “I knew he’d go slithering back to L.A., but I wanted to wait until I was sure before I contacted you.”

“How did you know?”

“I have my ways.” She produced two wineglasses from the back of a cabinet, blew into them to clear the dust, and set them down on the bar in triumph. “Anyway, it was only a matter of time, once he saw what I had on him.” She closed the cabinet. “What we had.”

“The video? How did you—” I was still standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, unwilling to take my seat until she came out of the kitchen.

“Isn’t it perfect? Once I figured out that he likes to order up a massage whenever he’s in a hotel . . . I just knew he would try something. I knew his MO, you know?” She reached up to a wine rack on top of the refrigerator, pulled out a bottle of red, checked the label, and put it back. “As a matter of fact, a lot of people do. You just have to be in the right online forums, understand the coded language. Nobody wants to call him out in public because he’s so universally adored.” She rolled her eyes. “But this guy, trust me, he does this all the time. Like, every chance he gets. And service workers are less motivated to keep it quiet than comics are.” Having pulled out a few more bottles of wine, she finally located one that pleased her and set it on the countertop next to the glasses. Then she said, “Corkscrew, where are you?” and started opening and closing drawers with the same jittery energy.

She eventually found one. “Give it to me,” I said to get her out of the kitchen faster. I opened the wine and poured it, then swiftly grabbed both glasses so she’d follow me to the sofa. “Now sit down and tell me everything. From the beginning.”

“Okay.” She perched on the short side of the L as I took a seat on the long side. “But first—” She leaned forward, brandishing the wineglass. “To having each other’s backs.”

“To having each other’s backs,” I said, trying not to betray my impatience as I clinked my glass to hers and drank. “So . . . entrapment. I’m more of a lead-pipe woman myself. In the study.” I laughed nervously at my own joke.

“I should really be toasting my former employers at Runnr,” she said, ignoring me. “These Silicon Valley types pride themselves on large-scale vision, but they have poor day-to-day management skills. And shockingly short attention spans.” She giggled. “It took the admin ages to get around to changing my passwords and revoking my access.”

“Access to what?”

“Everything.” She raised her eyebrows. “User data, code—half of which I built from scratch, by the way. Eventually I had to turn over my laptop and sign mountains of nondisclosure and noncompete agreements—proprietary tech and IP theft is what they care about.” She took a big gulp of wine. “But by that time, I’d already gotten into the code and left a number of back doors open for myself—along with a few bugs. After I left, they were too busy putting out fires without the help of their best programmer to double-check the metadata. Particularly the user database. There is a lot of information in there, my friend.”

“So Neely uses Runnr?” I said, finally catching up.

“Everyone uses Runnr,” she said, then looked at me. “Well, everyone whose time is worth more than the Runnr fees. Which are dirt cheap, because it’s ridiculously easy to get signed up as any kind of runner, even the ones you supposedly need to have a license for.”