Read Ladies' Night for Free Online Page B

booster, strictly small-time — hot watches, t-shirts, rings. That shit. He'd known some real good boosters in his day. One sister in particular who was so fucking good she could boost a full mink coat out of Bendel's or Bergdorf's, stuff it between her legs and walk right out of there.
    None of it was trouble.
    He nibbled his fries. He figured he'd wait till the booster drifted. You never knew. Could be somebody’s boyfriend, one of the girls behind the counter, and you could never say when some motherfucker'd go all Bruce Lee on you.
    You take your time , he thought.
    He sipped the shake and ate his burgers, the weight of the pistol reassuring at his side.
    ~ * ~
    At the kiosk at 72nd Street Mary Silver handed the man his change. If the man knew her and could have read her smile, he'd have seen the contempt there.
    She sold the shit but she didn't have to like it,
    Screw , Playboy , Penthouse , Jugs . They were all the same to her. Night after night she sat on the stool behind the newsstand surrounded by the stuff.
    It was always a man who would buy. Never a woman. Not once. And always the contempt was there. Another guy in rut without a place to put it.
    A woman in tights and Nikes handed her two dollars for a copy of the Sunday Times . She made change.
    "Thanks," she said. This time the smile was genuine.
    On Saturday nights it was mostly the Sunday Times and the Sunday News people were buying, and that made Saturday nights okay in her book. By six o'clock the front sections were delivered and she and the boys would put them together by nine — and after that most of her business was papers, not porn.
    She could remember a time when it hadn't mattered. She'd even been curious enough to look at the stuff.
    That was before the fat man with the scars on his neck and the breath that stunk of Dentyne gum and cigarettes who — in the process of raping her, while his big hands were on her breasts and her own on his cock, trying to get his sad deflated cock up so he wouldn't turn lunatic and kill her — had said she looked like something out of Playboy .
    Playboy .
    Nice. It was supposed to be a compliment.
    It was right after that that she'd decided to take the course in Dim Ching and Karate and started keeping the twelve-inch blade beneath the counter at night. And started hating pornography.
    She'd discussed it with the women in her group. They all had reached the same conclusion. There was no excuse for porn other than to debase women. It was an instrument of terror, pure and simple — the patriarchal society keeping the girls in line by turning them into boy-toys. As far as she was concerned Guccione , Goldstein and the others were as bad as Hitler — freaks and genocides, all of them.
    There was irony here.
    The only reason she'd gotten into the business in the first place was that she'd looked around one day and realized that in all of Manhattan there wasn't a single newspaper kiosk run by a woman. She'd decided to change that. She'd . . . infiltrated.
    She'd found that there were simply no profits in newspapers. It was all in cigarettes and magazines.
    Skin mags were the biggest draw of all.
    So she had herself a situation here. She'd decided not to buy the kiosk.
    "Thanks," she said as yet another asshole handed her a ten dollar bill for a copy of Penthouse . She gave him back his change.
    Most nights she could carry this off with some measure of philosophy. She had an application in as manager over at Barnes & Noble — this was just temporary. But tonight she was having a hell of a time. Her head was throbbing. She'd been popping aspirin all evening but it didn't seem to help. If one more creep eyed her breasts beyond the wall of newspapers she just might murder the bastard.
    It'll pass , she thought.
    But it did not pass, as the night drew Mary Silver slowly down to morning.
    ~ * ~
    "Five copies at $6.95," said Sheldon. "Three at $7.50." Lydia ticked them off on her check sheet.
    Sheldon