Read Online Snitch Factory: A Novel by Peter Plate - Free Book Online

had a daughter and son. They were living in Los Angeles with their maternal grandparents and working in a Salvation
Army cafeteria. Sorry to say, we didn’t see either of them that much.
    The night always brought out desolate thoughts in me, especially when I was in bed after one of your basic weekdays. I looked at Frank, and at his glistening, obdurate erection. I knew that it was time to turn out the lights. I leaned over and switched off the bedside lamp.
    Some of the iciest people I’d ever met were social workers. Lavoris, for example. Someone who needed a personality transplant. She was glacial, advertising the characteristics of a freshly mopped public toilet. But Frank was not like her.
    “Remember that manual we looked at? Go slow,” I said.
    Frank got on his knees and assumed the missionary stance. He was the first man I’d ever met who could execute this position with any finesse or authority. He made it feel luxurious and I lifted my legs for him, splaying them, which was saintly of me, because only some women did that for their lovers. Then he speared me with his organ and I jabbed his buttocks with my feet.
    I cradled him in my arms, feeling like I used to when I was a girl. Back then, I’d stare out the window at the full moon rising over the skyline and fantasize about being a heroine, a notable figure. I licked Frank’s ear and contracted my pussy around the base of his cock and said, “You’re a treasure.”
    When we’d hooked up, dating and drinking in bars like the 500 Club or in Blondie’s on Valencia Street, it was the anniversary of my tenth year at the DSS. Maybe Frank had been attracted to my professional reputation; some members of the social services community said that I was a go-getter and deserved a medal for valor. Others said that I was a fraud.

    But I wished he’d known me years ago, back when Petard was preparing me to assume the mantle of his heir. I was foxier then. I wore mascara, took black beauties, teased my hair, went out nightly, and was very popular at the DSS. At the time, my co-workers thought my rise was infectious, that Petard’s power had rubbed off on me. Even if I didn’t know it, that might have been so.
    Frank was heaving. I had admonished him: slow it down, dumbo. But he couldn’t brake his manic rhythm. Sometimes, men seemed so lonely in their quest for affection, even when they were inside you. I’d give him another minute and that would be it. The wet, velvet walls of my slit robbed him of every desire in life except to jet up and down fast as he could. He pinned me to the mattress, nipple to nipple, blubbering, “Give me your hand. I’m coming.”
    Theoretically, an orgasm was salubrious. But I had seen men get angry and weep when they climaxed. For some reason, I don’t know why, I thought of the waiting room. It was one of those associative connections where a sensation on the body instantly evokes a complementing recollection.
    We’d been introduced, my future husband and me, at one of the public forums the DSS used to throw to talk about assistance-related child care, home nursing, adult education and geriatric facilities. Petard said these events would generate a healthy public image for us.
    Frank had been part of an entourage of students from San Francisco Community College. I was charmed by their roguish innocence. Stunning to me, it really was. They were disarmingly gauche, decked out in Ben Davis jeans, Converse running shoes and Carhartt anoraks, resembling the thugs and purse snatchers that came out after dark to lurk around the McDonald’s on Twenty-fourth Street.

    It was the month Gerald began to change his policies, arguing for a more conservative plank. He’d even attempted to institute a workfare proposal, sending out squadrons of pregnant teen mothers in Department of Public Works trucks to sweep the sidewalks. For a time, you saw them on Mission Street. Girls with distended stomachs pushing industrial brooms, uniformed in orange