Greg Iles - 24 Hours

“I don’t want to beat a dead horse here. And I don’t want to pry. But I would really like to know how you ended up in prostitution. I mean, you just don’t look like one. You look too fresh. You’re beautiful, for God’s sake. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“How old is Joe?”

“Fifty.”

Twenty-four years’ difference. “Where are you from?”

Cheryl sighed. “Do we have to play Twenty Questions?”

“What else is there to do?”

“I could use a drink.”

Will walked over to the phone.

“What are you doing?” she asked, laying a hand on the gun.

“Ordering you a drink. What do you like?”

She looked suspicious. “I guess it won’t hurt anything. I like rum and Coke.”

He called room service and ordered a bottle of Bacardi, a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and a pot of tea for himself.

“You English or something?” asked Cheryl.

“I just like tea.” What he wanted was caffeine, enough to get him through whatever was going to be required of him in the next twelve hours. He needed a pain pill, too, for his joints, but he wasn’t going to take anything that might dull his mind. He needed his edge tonight.

“So, where are you from?” he asked again.

“Nowhere. Everywhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“My dad was in the army. We moved a lot when I was a little girl.”

“My wife grew up the same way. Moving from base to base.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “I doubt much was the same about it. She was probably the colonel’s daughter or something.”

“No. Her father was a master sergeant.”

“Yeah? My father was a captain. Or so I’m told. He screwed up some way, so they never let him go to Vietnam. He took it out on my mom for one too many years, and she finally left him. We went back to her hometown, little nothing of a place in Marion County. Then she hooked up with my stepfather.” Cheryl’s eyes glazed. “That was a whole new thing. I was about ten, I guess. After he got tired of Mom in the sack, he turned to me. She was so scared he’d leave us, she wouldn’t listen to anything I said. When I turned sixteen, I got the hell out of there.”

“Where’d you go?”

“I had a girlfriend who’d gone to Hinds Junior College. She had an apartment in Jackson with two other girls. I crashed with her for a couple of weeks, got a job waiting tables. I was barely making enough to help with the rent, and her roomies got mad. One of them was dancing at this club in Jackson. She was making three hundred bucks a night. Straight, you know? Just lap dances and stuff, no tricks out back. A couple of nights, just for kicks, a bunch of us went in there and watched her dance. It wasn’t at all what I thought. I mean, some of the men were pathetic and all that, but it wasn’t humiliating. The girls were in control. For the most part, anyway. Or that’s what it looked like.”

“You started stripping?”

“Not right away. But my girlfriend got pregnant, and her boyfriend ran offshore. She went back home to Mayberry RFD, and suddenly my share of the rent went up. So I gave it a try. And it worked. I was a natural, they said. Plenty of nights I made six hundred bucks. Of course, I had to kick half of that back to the club.”

“That sounds like enough money to eventually move up to a different kind of job.”

“That’s not how it works. See, stripping is like any night job. Musician, whatever. You’ve got these long shifts. You sleep all day, so you don’t really meet normal people. You get tired as hell. I mean, have you ever danced for eight hours straight? Drinking beer and mixed drinks? Plus, you find out it’s not exactly what you thought. You’ve got your lap dances, which are fine. But then you’ve got sofa dances. A sofa dance is a little more involved. The guys want to make it, you know? It’s hand jobs on the outside of the pants, or dry humping till they get off. What you try to do is get them almost there just as the song ends. Then they’ll come across with another thirty bucks to get off at the start of the next song. You do that for eight hours, you start needing something to keep you going. To keep you from sinking too far down, you know?”

“Cocaine.”

A hint of a smile animated her lips, like a ghost smiling from within her. “The sweet thing.”

“And once you got on coke, they had you.”

“Yep. Pretty soon you’re only breaking even on the dancing, just to keep up your habit. Then you’re into them for money. Dancing eight hours a day, just to pay the vig on what you owe. And that’s when they hit you. There’s ways to pay off the principal.”

“Turning tricks.”

“Blow jobs in the bathroom. Half-and-half in the cars out back. Around the world in the motel up the street, after your shift.”

“Jesus.”

Her eyes looked ancient in her young face. “Girls don’t last long doing that, Doc. These are people, you know? Single mothers trying to raise kids. Girls working through junior college.”

“And Joe got you out?”

A cynical smile. “Sir Galahad to the rescue. That’s Joe. One night he paid for a trick at the motel, packed me into his car, and hauled me all the way down to New Orleans. He had a house in Gentilly. He put mattresses on the walls, boarded up the windows, and locked me in.” She shuddered at the memory. “Cold turkey. He cleaned up the vomit and brought me soup. Talk about a nightmare.”

Will tried to imagine how Joe saw this drama in his mind. He probably did see himself as some sort of knight, rescuing the fair damsel from the dark castle. And Cheryl was fair, all right. It was difficult to believe that she had endured the ravages of the life she described. Working the ERs as a resident, Will had seen twenty-six-year-old whores who looked fifty. Cheryl looked like a sorority girl from Ole Miss, poised in that bloom of youth between college and marriage. Maybe a little hard around the jaw and eyes, but otherwise unmarred.

“How the hell did you wind up kidnapping kids? Is that what Sir Galahad rescued you for?”

“It wasn’t like that. Not at first. But we needed money. Joe tried some straight things, but they never seemed to work out. And I knew how to strip. He put me in a club in Metairie, just outside New Orleans. Nice club. He stayed every night watching over me. No drugs, no drinking. I was making so much money, we couldn’t believe it. Everybody said I was better than the featured dancers who came through, you know, Penthouse pets, girls like that. So I got into that for a while.” Cheryl’s eyes suddenly lit up, the way Abby’s did when she was telling someone about her doll collection. “I had a dozen different outfits, props, the whole works. I had a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and we’d drive around the country, following my club tour. Texas, Colorado, Montana… man, it was something.”

“But?”

She looked down at the gun in her lap. “Joe got jealous. I was good enough that people started talking to me about other things. Movie people. Not like Sandra Bullock, you know, but still Hollywood. Soft porn stuff, like you see on Cinemax. And Joe got nervous about that. He didn’t… He-”

“He didn’t want you out from under,” Will said. “He wanted you all to himself, all the time.”

She nodded sadly. “Yeah.”

“You couldn’t break loose?”

“I owed him, okay? I owed him in a way only me and him understood.”

“For getting you off crack?”

“Not just that, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where’s my damn drink?”

As though in answer to her question, a knock sounded at the door. Will walked through the sitting room of the suite and accepted the tray from a young Mexican girl. He tipped her liberally, then hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign and carried the tray in to Cheryl.