Disclaimer: The characters aren't mine, and no profit is made from these stories. (But I do have fun writing them. : )

"Would you mind telling me why you're being so quiet?" Mike asked. "When I invited you out for coffee, I assumed that it would be accompanied by conversation."

It had been over a decade since Mike and Lennie worked together. A lot had happened since then – Mike went from Staten Island to Major Cases, and Lennie was retired. But the bond between the former partners hadn't faded. They met on occasion to shoot the bull, but this time, Lennie was strangely silent.

"If I wanted to drink coffee with a corpse, I would have gone to the morgue," Mike quipped. "What's eating you?"

Lennie sighed, looking up from his coffee cup. "Rey finally convinced me to enter the 21st century. I bought a computer, so I could keep in touch with Julia. She sends pictures of the grandkids."

"And the thing crashed?" Mike asked. "No surprise there. Computers are built so damn cheaply these days."

"No, the machine works fine."

"Then what is it? Something's definitely got your goat."

Lennie looked nervously around the diner. "Okay, here's the thing. I was – what do they call it – 'surfing' one day, and I stumbled across one of those porno sites –"

"Stumbled across it? If that's how you want to play it, fine. Lennie, everyone with a connection has looked at those things at least once."

"You know I'm open-minded, Mike, but I had no idea that you were an exhibitionist."

"WHAT!" Mike exclaimed. Several patrons turned to stare at them.

"Yeah. You were doing the horizontal mambo with some brunette chick. The site was 'Hot Amateurs' or something like that."

"Very funny, Lennie. You had me going there for a minute."

"I'm not joking. The video was grainy, but it was you all right. But if it makes you feel any better, I think it's an old video. You were younger, and the girl had '80s hair."

Mike blanched. He remembered, but barely. He'd had way too much to drink when his girlfriend at the time suggested that they play with her brand-new video camera. They broke up soon after that, and he hadn't thought about it since. It must have been over twenty years ago.

"Oh my God," he said. "How in the hell did that video wind up on the Internet?"

"You mean that you didn't know about this?" Lennie asked. "I thought that it was some kind of secret sideline."

"Are you kidding? I never intended for my wild oats to go public!"


Mike only managed to watch the video for a few seconds before turning it off.

Lennie had been right. Surprisingly, it didn't take much searching – Mike just Googled 'hot amateurs' and clicked the first link. He didn't even want to think of how many people had already watched it.

Betrayed for a buck. Mike hadn't paid to download the video, but he assumed that Laura wouldn't allow herself to be exposed for free. He had no idea where to find her now – it was so long ago, and they'd only dated for a few weeks. But he was going to find her, and whoever else was responsible for this.

In the meantime, he hoped that Ross wasn't into porn.

finis