Carol (Carol Schmidt Series)
Read Carol (Carol Schmidt Series) Online
Authors: Lori Cook
CAROL
a novel
by Lori Cook
The human body is the
best work of art.
Jess C. Scott
Copyright © 2013
Lori Cook
Cover design:
Stuart Bache
This book is a
work of imaginative fiction. Characters, names, places and all events portrayed
are either products of the author’s imagination or are used to add authenticity
to the work. Any resemblance to real events, locales, or people is entirely
coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, without permission in writing from Lori Cook.
There weren’t many
people in the place when she arrived. Over to her right, sitting alone at a
table, was the Cardinal, his laptop open in front of him. He looked up, saw
her, then turned his eyes toward the bar.
She followed his stare. There was one guy there, tall, good looking.
He was taking a drink from what seemed to be a bourbon on the rocks, a cell
pressed to his ear.
It was him.
The Cardinal was never wrong.
She hoisted herself up onto the stool at the end of the bar, a hand
flattening down the skirt of her navy blue business suit, and fussed around
with her purse.
By now, the Cardinal had slipped silently out into the night. He
didn’t much care for this part of proceedings. Plus, he trusted her completely.
She had never let him down.
“You need some company?” the guy at the bar said, stepping some way
toward her, but keeping at an unthreatening distance.
“Oh,” she said, looking up. “I... I guess.”
He smiled, his white teeth just a little crooked. His suit was good,
light grey with an expensive sheen to it. He’d loosened his necktie, which she
was pleased to see was modest. She hated men in loud, brash ties; it made her
want to strangle them in vivid Technicolor.
“Brad,” he said, slipping onto the stool next to her.
I know.
“Carol,” she said, smiling in that way that shy girls do, nodding
their heads a fraction as if in nervous agreement with themselves.
“You’re from out of town, right?” he said.
She looked a little confused.
He grinned, held up a hand, and counted off his fingers as he spoke.
“One: you’re in a business suit and you’re carrying a briefcase.
Two: you look as if you don’t know this place. Three: you’re alone at seven-thirty
on a Friday evening. Someone as attractive as you never has to be alone on a
Friday night. Not in her own town. Am I right?”
She did that girl thing with her hands, like she was trying to waft
away the blushes. But all the modesty in the world couldn’t hide the fact that
she was extremely attractive.
Brad tried not to look too hard. It was a perfectly symmetrical kind
of beauty, something that didn’t need much in the way of embellishments. Her
hair was dark brown, almost black, some way between a tulip cut and a Louise
Brookes.
The waiter arrived. Brad made a big thing about getting her a drink.
She asked for a tonic water.
“Sure you don’t want a little squirt of vodka in that?” Brad asked.
For a moment she paused, as if unsure. A vodka?
Could
she,
her indecision seemed to say?
Should
she?
“Heck, why not!” she said. “And make it a large one. I’m
celebrating, I guess...”
Brad was in his element. He got himself another bourbon and started
imagining how he might do some of that celebrating with her.
“So, what is it?” he asked. “State lottery?”
“No. I just got out of jail. Ten years. Second-degree murder.”
Her drink arrived. She took a sip. Brad was just about managing to
keep his winning smile going.
“
Joke!
” she said. “Divorce anniversary. Twelve whole months
today.”
“Here’s to you, Carol,” he said, holding up his glass, his body
relaxing. “I’m two years down that road myself.”
They chinked glasses.
“It’s also,” she said, looking down at the ice in her drink, “I
mean, it sounds a bit weird, but it’s the first time I’ve done
this
,
since before I was married.”
“This?”
“Y’know, sitting at a bar.”
Brad snorted. “And talking to a guy who already knows you’re way out
of his league...”
She laughed. “Yeah!” A pause. “The bit about talking to a guy in a
bar. You’re not out of my league, I mean, at
all
.”
For the first time she looked him right in the eye. She wasn’t
afraid. She was confident, just confident enough.
“Nothing complicated,” she said. “I’m not looking for anything
complicated.”
“I hear you.”
“You’ve got kind eyes, Brad. That’s all I’m looking for. Someone I
can trust.”
“For one night only.”
“Yeah, kind of. Y’know what? I walk right in here and you’re the
first person I meet. Perhaps I did win the lottery!”
Outside, the Cardinal was sitting in a large black Mercedes, the
laptop now on the large leather passenger seat beside him. He watched, the
sound on the live video turned down, as Brad chatted amiably to his new friend.
He didn’t need to hear all that crap. It wasn’t as if Brad was going to say
anything unexpected, nothing out-there, nothing interesting. No, Brad was going
to play this strictly by the rules.
Although, of course, Brad was not his real name.
The Cardinal looked closer at the screen. There was a glint in
Brad’s
eyes, and a smirk right across his mouth as he talked easily to Carol. The
smirk said it all: he could hardly believe his luck.
In his line of work, Brad had to take what he could get, the rough
with the smooth, the good with the not so good. In any case, a little variety
was good for business. But tonight, a goddess had walked into the room and
offered herself up to him, no questions asked. This was gonna be his best night
ever.
The camera in Carol’s lapel was high quality, and gave pretty clear
images despite its size. She was keeping Brad in the picture most of the time,
letting him do the talking. He was a good talker, too, and before they knew it
there was a second round of drinks. The bar was now slowly filling up with
evening drinkers. From time to time she panned around to take in the atmosphere.
The Cardinal clicked over to the web. He logged onto
BAD-DADDY-PICKUP.COM, one of the world’s most successful pickup blogs. Run by a
single blogger, the self-styled “Bad Daddy,” every posting was a collection of
images and secretly recorded video footage of his latest conquest. There was a
new woman every night, and every night Bad Daddy would take things just a
little bit too far with his unsuspecting pickup.
How far? That depended on the girl, and on his mood. And that’s why
the site got hundreds of thousands of hits each day, from all over the world:
it was, quite simply, the real thing, played out before your eager, pining
eyes.
The Cardinal clicked on a video from last night’s offering, a young,
plain-looking woman. She was eating a hamburger and fries, Bad Daddy’s own tiny
lapel camera pointing at her secretly from across the table of the diner. She
looked nervy, brushing her long blond hair from her forehead and smiling coyly.
She might have been eighteen, twenty at a stretch.
Below the video were some idiot ramblings from Bad Daddy himself,
then more shots of the same girl in a bar drinking a cocktail.
Finally, the main event. Three concealed cameras in a hotel room had
been used, the footage roughly edited and presented without any commentary or embellishment.
Bad Daddy had no video editing skills whatsoever. But that only added to the
authenticity of his daily postings. It was as if, having gotten another victim
into bed and taken her as far as he wanted, uploading the footage was almost
too much effort, a job hardly worth doing. Just a bit of fun.
The Cardinal shook his head as he watched it, his face
expressionless apart from the slightest sneer of contempt. The session began
predictably enough. They sat on the bed a while, chatting, sometimes laughing.
Brad, it had to be said, knew how to talk to a girl. He could have written a
book about that, a whole encyclopedia on chat-up lines, Mars and Venus, that
kind of stuff. But his blog always focused on the main event of his nightly
pickup.
They started to make out, the young girl and Brad on the hotel bed,
taking it nice and slow. She was keen, and he let her take the lead. Five
minutes later they were down to their underwear and necking hard, clutching
each others’ asses, thighs pushing up towards crotches, forcing legs apart.
They were like two teenagers at a party.
Fast-forward: twenty minutes later and what had started out as
passion was turning by degrees into something else. Bad Daddy was now mauling
her with increasing force, pushing her into new positions and holding her there
while he entered her. Her moans were muted and submissive.
The Cardinal flipped his laptop closed, not bothering to skip to the
end and see how it finished.
Meanwhile, in the bar Carol and Brad had taken a corner booth, where
the lights were low and they could get to know each other better. As she
listened to his vacuous chatter about a career that she knew for a fact he
didn’t have, she thought she recognized him from the website. The videos posted
there never showed Big Daddy’s face in any detail, but after a while you got a
sense of what he was like: six foot, good build, athletic but not honed, just a
naturally lean physique.
It was definitely Bad Daddy. No doubt about it. His hair was short
and well groomed, same as in the videos, kind of preppy and safe, the cut you’d
have for a job interview. And here in the flesh there was something appealing
about him, a smile that was meant to suggest vulnerability as well as a deep
masculinity. He was, without a doubt, hot.
Little surprise that he’d gotten into this game, then. For pickups,
he was the perfect specimen. And his website was thriving. The Cardinal had
estimated it was generating ten grand a month in advertising. That required a
regular supply of one night stands, each one to be secretly filmed. Yes, Bad
Daddy needed to be good at pickups; he had a business to run, and he’d hardly
missed a day in over a year.
Brad was a good choice for a name, too. It had a youthful ring to
it, something friendly, a pal’s name, the kind of guy a girl might have as a
friend. Problem was: Brad secretly filmed his pickups, night after night,
filming those girls at their most intimate, and earning good money off of it.
Payback.
“And you guys just split everything down the middle?” he said. “That’s
so cool!”
They were swapping divorce stories, snuggled up in the coziest booth
in the bar. Carol was making it up as she went along. But Brad had his story
worked out in advance. When you pick up a new girl every night, you’ve got
plenty of time to develop your sales pitch.
He’d done a good job on it too.
Really
good. His ex-wife
hadn’t understood the pressure he was under, he said. They’d just drifted
apart.
Brad
, you see, was an attorney working for various non-profits:
environment law, immigration, that sort of stuff. He was on the side of the
little guy, fighting for what was right. He could’ve made more in commercial
law, he said, but what the hell, he did pretty good.
Then there was his parents. They’d died in a traffic accident,
leaving him a beach house in Maine and an apartment in Boston. He liked nothing
better than to take fishing trips up there on the coast, whenever his legal
crusades on behalf of the world’s good causes permitted.
Oh yes, Brad was a pretty neat package. Some of those girls he
picked up must have looked at the winning smile, heard his potted life story,
and thought: this is it, madam, your boat has well and truly come in tonight!
Even if you wanted nothing more than honest, uncomplicated fun, he looked like
just the ticket. Not many girls would kick Brad out of bed on a cold night. And
he knew it.
Carol spun some bullshit about her own phantom divorce, whispering
so he’d have to lean right into her. They were laughing, already on their third
drink, and Brad was swimming in what looked like delirious happiness, but which
Carol knew was in fact the smug satisfaction of knowing that he was about to
bed the horniest woman ever to feature on his disgusting blog.
Back in the Merc, the Cardinal had reopened his computer and was now
watching as their inane conversation unfolded, getting bored and impatient. The
lights in the bar had been lowered, and the images were not so good. But Carol
had at least managed to get the lapel camera pointing in their direction, her
jacket folded up neatly on the table in front of them. The audio was nice and
clear, too.
The Cardinal now hacked into BAD-DADDY-PICKUP.COM and streamed the
whole thing there. Why not let all those fans see how a pickup plays out in
real time for once, right from the drinks in the bar? And it would be just the
once, he told himself as he clicked across to the site and saw a grainy image
of the booth and two happy faces. Bad Daddy was laughing out loud, full of
himself, the pickup master in full, nauseating flow. And although he didn’t
know it, the world was finally getting to see what he looked like.
She shifted closer to him, their thighs touching, even their
shoulders and arms.
“Brad,” she said, interrupting him and taking his hand in hers, “I
don’t want to ruin this. Really I don’t.”
She shook her head as if she couldn’t understand her own feelings.