Posted on August 16, 2008

Karaoke Quintessence: Chapter 2: Tweens

He’d let them in, feeling a little creepy about doing it. You read a lot of stuff in the newspaper about perverts and kids and in his line of work, he didn’t need rumors of that sort keeping clients away—or getting cops too interested in whatever else he might be up to.

But it was a Saturday afternoon and Alex Dale was bored. He showed them the seats in front of his desk. They sat down and leaded together, chatting in whispers. He let them, waiting to see what would happen.

Eventually they stopped. The teenybopper on the left flexed her bicep. The muscle failed to puff her lacy shirt. “I’m tough,” she said. “Grrr.” She put her arm down and laughed: bright, liquid, and like teeth on pavement. “But you gotta be careful, right?”

Alex Dale leaned forward across his desk, his face coming out of shadow and into the glare from the office window and reflections off the girls’ jewelry. “What do you want?” he said.

She giggled again. “Oh, rad! Yeah.” She turned to her friend. “See, Madison? What did I say? I said, ‘It’ll be just like on television.’ ‘What do you want?’ Like in a movie!”

Madison grinned and clapped her hands together. Dozens of plastic and rubber bracelets on her wrists clattered. She said, “Noir.”

“Right on!” the one who wasn’t Madison responded. “Noir.”

Dale’s temple twitched. “What do you want?”

“Things,” the little one said. “Me, I’m Charlotte, this is Madison, and we kind a want to hire you.”

“For?”

“He’s silly,” Madison said, her hand—decked to bursting with rings of silver, gold, and candy plastic—held in front of her mouth.

Charlotte waved her off. “For protection,” she said. “That’s what you do, right? What you people do? You protect clients.”

“We wanna be your clients,” Madison said.

Dale sat back, returned to gloom. “No.”

“What?” Madison said.

“Why?” Charlotte said.

Dale craved a cigarette. “You need protection, that’s what the police are for. Or your parents—which is who you should be talking to if you’re scared. I’m not the person to help. I don’t protect kids.”

“We’re not kids,” Charlotte pouted.

Madison said, “We’re tweens.”

“Right,” Dale said.

Charlotte stood up. She smoothed down the front of her dress, closed her eyes, and inhaled. Then she let the breath out and opened them. “Mr. Dale—detective Dale—we need your help. It’s not like we’re little children. We’re pretty much grown up. Madison will be able to drive in only a few years. I can drink coffee sometimes. We’re old enough to know that we really need your help.”

Madison sat forward in her chair and put her hands on Dale’s desk. “Mr. Dale, can you please just listen? It’ll only take a minute. Then, if you want”—she looked at Charlotte—“you can call our parents.”

“Yeah, you can call them then,” Charlotte said. She sat down.

Dale sighed. The hallway outside his office was empty. Nobody was waiting for his services. If these girls could pay…

“Tell me exactly what you want me to do,” he said.

“There’s this thing. I guess you could say it was kind of lost,” Charlotte said. “These guys are looking for it.”

“What does that have to do with protecting you?” Dale said.

“That’s the thing. We need you to protect us, but that’s because we think they think we know where it is. But we don’t—”

“No idea,” Madison said.

“These guys,” Charlotte said, “they’re kind of hard to track down and so we don’t know how to, I guess, keep us safe ourselves. And so that’s kind of what we want you to do. We want to you to figure out where these guys are, you know? And then get them off our backs. ‘Cause it’s totally not cool that they think we stole their stuff, because we didn’t.”

“How am I supposed to get them off your backs?,” Dale said. ” If they’re threatening you, like I said before, you need to call the cops. That’s what police are for. I’m a detective. I find things, I find people. I’m not a bodyguard.”

“Oh, but see, that’s what we want. The cops—”

“These guys would totally fuck the cops,” Madison said.

Charlotte turned on her. “Don’t talk like that!” she said. “This nice man is going to help us, and you go out and try to ruin it all by swearing? Gosh, Madison, you’re so dumb.”

“It’s okay,” Dale said. “I’ve heard worse.”

“Thank you,” Charlotte said, still glaring at Madison. She let her gaze come back around to Dale and continued. “We’re pretty sure the only way these guys are going to leave us alone is if they stop this stupid idea that we have this thing. We’re good at hiding things—”

“Really good,” Madison said.

“—and so, I guess, maybe these guys aren’t totally crazy to think we put it somewhere.”

Dale said, “But you didn’t.”

“Swear to God,” Charlotte said. “And to get these guys to believe us, the only thing we can do is find it ourselves and give it back to them. Because we can’t kill them.”

“No,” Dale said. “You can’t.” Charlotte’s “can’t” sounded more like “aren’t able to” instead of “shouldn’t.” There was something wrong with these girls. He couldn’t identify what, but it was there—and it made him curious. He decided to take their money, if they had any, and see where it lead.

Charlotte looked at him. She was quiet. Her eyes were big and pleading, an expression she’d clearly practiced.

“You want me to find it?” Dale asked.

“Yeah,” Charlotte said.

“What is it?”

Madison stood up. “It’s the culture box,” she said.

Charlotte rolled her eyes.