Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) by Walter Mosley

night, not thanking Lewis for the work he and Talia had done or filling out the papers that I must have signed. The next thing I knew I was pulling into my driveway, wondering if Richard Ness would be waiting for me.

    The night passed like waves that back up on themselves and then press forward again. This feeling was in the form of dreams and half-conscious musings. The ideas from both states of awareness traded places, moved back and forth almost as if I were a fabricated notion of some other being who had conjured me as a character in fiction or a play.
    The character, me—young Sandy Peel—was fifteen and on the run from the police. I had been giving blow jobs in a parking lot south of Hollywood Boulevard and the cops were cracking down on that activity. My best friend at the time, Amy Chapman, had been arrested and sent to jail for thirty days even though she was my age.
    I saw the cops and they saw me. I went through a wire gate into an alley that split into three directions. I went straight ahead, climbed into a backyard where a dog tried to bite me, and made it to the boulevard. I walked into a chain coffee shop and took a seat at a table where a man was drinking expensive coffee served in a paper cup.
    â€œExcuse me,” I said to the gentleman. “Can I sit here with you for a little while?”
    â€œYou solo?” he asked.
    â€œHuh?”
    He smiled at my naïveté.
    His smile made me mad and I would have gotten up and left, but I saw the uniforms that had been chasing me right outside the coffee shop window.
    The man saw my fear and its source with a glance andmoved his chair so that his body blocked me from being seen.
    â€œMy name is Theon Pinkney,” he said.
    He was around forty, ancient to my teenage eyes, wearing gray slacks and a maroon dress shirt open to show off his chest hair.
    â€œI’m Debbie Dare,” I said, making up a whole new life then and there.
    â€œMy car’s in the parking lot out back,” he said. “Would you like me to drive you somewhere?”
    â€œOut from this life into another one where a girl could hit a break,” I said.
    I had heard these words from Mela David, an older prostitute who sometimes threw work our way. If all a guy wanted was a fifteen-dollar blow job, she’d send him to the parking lot that Amy and I haunted.
    Theon smiled and gestured toward the back of the restaurant with his right hand. He wore three thick gold rings, with a single gem embedded in each: one ruby, one emerald, and a yellow diamond. The brightness of those jewels took my breath away.
    He drove a red Rolls with the softest calfskin seats I ever sat in.
    He reached over and pulled my seat belt on for me. This was also a first in my experience. Every other time I got in a strange man’s car it was to suck his dick, and you couldn’t do that in a harness.
    As he turned left onto Hollywood he asked, “Now, where is this life you were talking about?”
    â€œWhere you live at?” I asked, and he smiled again.
    â€œDo you know who I am?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œYou ever watch X-rated movies?”
    â€œSometimes I be wit’ a boyfriend who watch ’em but I never paid much mind.”
    â€œI bet it takes a lot to impress you.”
    â€œI like your rings,” I said with some emphasis.
    â€œHow old are you?”
    â€œOld enough to get arrested for suckin’ a white man’s dick in the front seat’a his car.”
    â€œDo they arrest the man?”
    â€œNo. They give him a summons an’ send him home.”
    â€œThey should arrest the john for child molesting and send you home to your mother.”
    â€œI ain’t no child.”
    â€œOnly a child could be as beautiful as you are, Debbie Dare.”
    I was very young and he was older than my dead father but that didn’t matter. The place I was looking for was a room where somebody looked at me and called me pretty. I was a wild