J. Jance: Left for Dead

Nobody did, because no one in Breeze’s present life knew or even guessed who she once was. Rose Ventana had been replaced. Even before she changed her name, Rose had changed her looks. One of the first things she did when she landed on Van Buren Street was to dye her hair. With her naturally tanned skin, she made a convincing and striking blonde. She was also young and on her own in a very rough part of town. That made her a target, and Chico Hernandez was the guy who had come to her rescue.

As part of Chico’s stable, Rose was rechristened with the name Breeze. Chico liked his girls to have unusual and often weather-related names: Breeze, Stormy, Dawn, Rain, Sunny. Weird names aside, working for Chico wasn’t such a bad thing. His girls were regarded as call girls rather than whores, and he forked over the money needed for them to dress the part. He had a particular clientele made up of guys who liked their partners to be girls, the younger the better, and Chico had people who usually handled the “bookings.”

Rose had always been self-conscious about being underendowed in the boob department, but in her new line of work, being small was an advantage. It made it easy for Chico to pass her off as several years younger than she was, and Breeze had the added advantage of being pretty. The braces her stepfather paid for served her in good stead. In a business where lots of the competition came with meth mouth, Breeze’s mouthful of straight white teeth offered yet another mark in her favor.

Breeze had been a part of Chico’s team for three years, but tonight she found herself wishing she were back in Buckeye in a clean room with clean sheets and with nothing to do the next morning except get up and go to school.

At last she managed to fall asleep. All her roommates were home and sleeping when Breeze’s cell phone rang at nine A.M.

“Okay,” Chico said. “I’ve got you a date in Fountain Hills. Meet me down in the lobby at ten. And don’t tell the other girls where you’re going.”

An hour later, with her roommates still sawing logs, it was easy for Breeze to do as she was told. She hurried downstairs without saying a word to anyone and found Chico waiting out front in his aging Lincoln Town Car. He gave her an appraising look as she climbed into the front seat.

“I told you Fountain Hills,” he said. “Couldn’t you do any better than jeans and a T-shirt?”

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t have time to do laundry.”

“All right,” he said. “We’ll do some shopping on the way.”

To her amazement, he took her to Biltmore Fashion Park, where a quick dash through Macy’s netted her some very high heels, a slinky little black dress, and some silky black underwear, all of which he had her wear out of the store. Breeze was happy to have the new clothing, but she was also a little puzzled. If Chico was having financial difficulties, why would he spend that kind of money on her?

Once they left Macy’s, it seemed to Breeze as though they drove forever. She never had any idea that Phoenix was that big. Chico was surprisingly quiet the whole way. Nervous, too. Breeze wanted to ask him what was going on and who the client was, but if life on the street had taught her any lessons at all, the most basic was not to ask questions, especially not when you didn’t want to hear the answers.

At last they turned off a winding strip of pavement onto a smaller but still curvy street. Eventually, Chico stopped the Lincoln in front of an ornate iron gate, complete with a manned guard shack. At the end of a long uphill drive sat an imposing house.

“Get out here,” Chico directed.

Breeze looked down at her five-inch heels. “In these?” she asked.

“Don’t worry. Someone will run you up the hill in a golf cart.”

“How do I get back?”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Someone will come get you.”

The other girls, the ones who had warned Breeze about Chico in the first place, had also warned her: Don’t get stranded somewhere you can’t get home from on your own steam.

Breeze glanced back the way they had come and realized she had no idea how to get back to the apartment in downtown Phoenix. “But-” she began.

“I said get out,” Chico urged. “Do what they tell you. Understand?”

Breeze got out of the car, and Chico’s Lincoln drove away. It was windy and surprisingly cold to be standing outside in a skimpy, sleeveless dress and a pair of sling-back pumps. She wished she had asked Chico to buy her a sweater, too. The guard opened the gate wide enough for her to slip inside the compound. As Chico drove away, the guard spoke into some kind of walkie-talkie. Minutes later, a golf cart came down the hill to get her. The ride in the open cart that brought Breeze up to the house left her shivering.

The cart stopped under a covered portico. Breeze stepped out of the cart and waited while the driver-a man wearing a uniform very much like that of the guard at the gatehouse-hurried up onto the porch, opened one of a matching pair of doors, and escorted her into a marble-floored entryway that was, she realized later, a beautiful entry into hell itself.

At the door the driver handed her off to a uniformed maid who led her into an ornate room that looked more like a museum or a hotel lobby than part of a house. There were huge paintings on the walls and groupings of furniture. At the far end of the room was a woodburning fireplace, alive with a roaring fire. A man stood as if posing for a photo shoot in front of the mantel. Holding a champagne flute in one hand, he watched as the maid led Breeze into the room.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The guest of honor has arrived. Let me take a look at you.”

Breeze wasn’t stupid. She knew why she was there, and it wasn’t as anybody’s guest of honor. The man carefully set his drink down on a table in front of the fireplace and then moved toward her. Breeze had become fairly adept at estimating johns’ ages. This one was at least sixty and very ugly. The bulbous red nose spoke of too much booze, the leathery lizardlike skin of too much sun, and the narrow eyes of too much meanness.

He stopped directly in front of her and stared her up and down. “Not bad,” he said at last. “Better-looking than I expected.”

Breeze was accustomed to this kind of frank appraisal. Even so, the way his eyes trailed over her body made her nervous.

“I’m forgetting my manners,” he said, giving her a leer. “Can I offer you some champagne?”

That was one of Chico’s rules: DO NOT DRINK WITH THE JOHNS! Not even champagne, even though a sip of champagne sounded very good right about then.

“No, thank you,” Breeze said.

“Lunch, then?”

“That would be nice,” she said.

He turned to the maid, who had retreated to the doorway, where she stood, awaiting further instructions. “You can bring lunch upstairs to the library,” he said.

Breeze had never been in a house with an actual library. Why someone would eat food in a library, she didn’t understand. Libraries were for books. Dining rooms were for eating.

“This way,” he said, reaching out and putting a proprietary arm around Breeze’s waist. “I wouldn’t want you to trip and fall on one of those amazing heels.”

With his arm still around her waist, he led her up a long curving staircase. There were thick rugs on the floors. There was more colorful artwork on the walls of the long upstairs hallway. The room he led her into was indeed a library. Three walls were covered, floor to ceiling, in shelves loaded with leather-bound books. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the entire Valley of the Sun. Breeze stood there staring while yet another uniformed maid rolled a linen-covered serving cart into the room.