Meredith's first day at Puzzlekiller was more than a week after her interview. She and Jason spent barely 2 days in Vegas before growing bored with the drinking and gambling and decided to head to Death Valley where they crashed at night at the Furnace Creek Inn, traveling the strange ruins that dot the massive place during the day. Entire cities with thousands of people once existed within the hot valley, then disappeared overnight. The ruins held both fascination and melancholy for Meredith and Jason, who could not help but think of themselves and the poem Ozymdandius. Jason and Meredith decided on an NSA (no strings attached) relationship as they shot back to L.A. in the open top convertible in the warm July night.

      The Monday drive to work was punctuated with the debauched leanings of Howard Stern on Sirius radio. Though she found Stern himself to be rather pedestrian as far as the thoughts that came out of his head, he held the same fascination for her that people with tourette’s had. Among the random guests that morning were Dennis Hof and Air Force Amy from the Bunny Ranch in Nevada discussing their lives in the world of legal prostitution.   Though legal prostitution in Nevada sounded attractive up front to promiscuous soccer moms and underpaid legal secretaries, one factor that Hof brought up was the registration with the State. Once you are 

registered and added to the state databases you permanently lost the anonymity that would outweigh the huge sums that helped forgive your sins.

In a way, Meredith had to admire those chicks who stopped being wage slaves to an indifferent work world and threw themselves head first into the naughtiest of professions to suck up as much cash as possible as quickly as possible. But on deeper examination she realized her admiration really hinged on a deeper truth for her. She thought it was really important to make men cum. When a man came, she felt like she had really accomplished something important. The money was simply verification of that importance. Men needed and respected that service enough to fork over ridiculous sums.

            When Howard came back from commercial break he wanted to try a call in question to the listeners.

            “Okay, we’re back. We’ve been speaking with Dennis Hof of the Bunny Ranch. I find it kind of intriguing that people like school teachers would work at the Bunny Ranch during their summer hiatus.”

            Robin chimed in. “A year’s income in 5 weeks.”

            “I wonder how many of my teachers were hookers.”

“And not just teachers,” Robin added. “How many professionals out there you meet every day might be doing this?”