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telephone. He gestured Phyllis to a folding metal chair and, behind the table, took another for himself.
    â€œIn my opinion, the best opportunities for a hot girl in the sex business these days is websites.” He threw a thumb at the open laptop. “According to Eddie, you had some difficulty in relating to the live audience. Well, it isn’t for everybody. Neither is phones. But on the internet, you got a variety to choose from. What I think might work for you is a voyeur site. Now, you got different kinds of them, too. You got your houses where a number of girls go about their business twenty-four/seven while cameras watch everything they do, undressing, showering, the toilet included, and everything in the bedrooms including blowing and fucking their boyfriends.” Larry smiled abstractly, looking just past Phyllis. “Just living, not acting. And then there’s the individual sites: One girl performs for the camera, you know? Plays with her titties and cooze, talks dirty, uses a dildo, and so on, and will do requests by e-mail. She doesn’t see them, so it’s personal for them but not her. That might be the ticket for you, Phyl. Takes some acting ability. Fingering your pussy over and over again for hours is, once again, not for every girl, and then there’s the audio: You got to keep ad-libbing, like on the phones.”
    â€œI’d be willing to try it,” said Phyllis.
    â€œGreat.” Larry pulled the laptop in front of him and began to press its keys. “This is how me and my brother communicate nowadays.”
    â€œYour brother Eddie?”
    He looked at her over the machine. “My brother Harry. He’s right downstairs in this building. We got the two floors.” He leaned forward to peer at the screen. “Harry says … come right down.” Larry pushed his chair away from the table.
    â€œThank you,” said Phyllis. “I believe I have fifty-five dollars coming for the four hours I worked the phone.”
    Larry returned to the computer and manipulated the keys. “Okay, Phyl, here’s how it looks. During the training period you get only five percent, which I think you’ll agree is generous in view of that last call which you bungled. There’s a slight charge for the bottled water.”
    â€œWhich I didn’t touch.”
    Larry ignored her comment and consulted the screen again. “You’ve got thirty bucks coming, but I have to owe it to you till the end of the month. I don’t get paid for the calls till the credit-card companies pay me.” He pushed his chair back again and spread his legs. “You owe me for sending you to Harry. If you want to go down on me as a thank-you, I might find a few extra dollars.”
    Phyllis still had two-thirds of her last charge, and her coordination was not disordered as it had been the night she went temporarily haywire and tried to punch Ellery Pierce. Rational now, she stood up, went to Larry, and knocked him out with one blow to a chin made prominent by a triumphant smirk. She found a leather wallet in the breast pocket of his jacket. From its abundant supply of bills she extracted a twenty and a ten.
    As she returned the wallet to his pocket, Larry groaned and without opening his eyes murmured, “You can’t kill a man for tryin’.”
    The statement made no sense to Phyllis, but then thus far very little had in the area of human morality. In her opinion, people should stick to what they did well, namely, technology.

5
    B efore long, Ellery Pierce and Janet Hallstrom were so comfortable with each other as no longer to be sexually intimate, and since they did not live together, there seemed little point in maintaining their connection. Soon he saw her, often with Hallstrom, only by chance, at the entrance to the apartment building or in the hallway, and though it could well be only because he knew the latter for an animatronic creature, Pierce no longer