Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

One in the morning. Heading west in my car. Blasting the radio to drown out the echoes.

I drive over the North Branch of the Chicago River and head a few more blocks west before pulling over. It won’t take long. This is a decent neighborhood by day, industrial, working-class. By night, it’s one of the places you go if you’re looking for white girls.

The first girl who passes looks Asian. Maybe my information is outdated, my short stint on Vice ending years ago. The woman stops, bends over, peers into the car. I shake my head no.

“What if she wakes up today?” I said. “And you’re not here?”

Valerie’s head dropped. “You and I both know that’s not going to happen.”

Anger, bitterness, always brimming near the surface during this whole ordeal, took over. “Then go,” I said. “Because those kids need you. The rapists and murderers and drug dealers—they need you.”

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “I’m on to something, Billy. There are girls, girls I might be able to help—”

“What about that girl?” I hissed, pointing toward the hospital room. “The one who happens to be your daughter? What about helping her?”

Her eyes brimmed with tears, her face hardening. “We can’t save her, Billy. Don’t you dare pretend we can. Don’t you dare be that cruel—”

“Fine—then go. Go save those other girls. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to worry about one beautiful little girl who needs her parents right now.”

I turned my back on Valerie and returned to the room.

The third girl who passes looks the part. Blond hair teased up, slinky outfit showing off her legs, sidling awkwardly up to my car on her high, chunky heels after we make eye contact.

I buzz down the passenger-side window.

“Hi, handsome,” she says. If the nose and cheekbones didn’t do it, the accent does. Eastern European. “Want some company?”

I nod. She opens the door and gets in.

She doesn’t tell me her name. I don’t tell her mine. No point in either of us lying.

She runs her hand high up my thigh, long purple nails scraping denim. “What would you like to do, handsome?” Her voice sultry, comforting, like I’m the man she’s always fantasized about, like she can’t believe her luck, meeting me.

“I have fifty dollars,” I say.

She tells me what that will get me. She tells me to drive, turn at the next right. After three blocks, we’re in a vacant lot by an abandoned manufacturing plant.

I put the car in Park and turn on the dome light, surprising her. “Lemme see your feet,” I say.

A quick arching of her eyebrows, but no more than that. This poor kid probably sees everything, fetishes of every kind. “You want to see my feet.”

“I like feet,” I say. “And heels.”

So she leans back against the passenger door and turns those spindly legs toward me, putting her feet and heels in my lap next to the steering wheel. I pretend to admire them, caress them, turning them from side to side as if appreciating fine art.

Nope. No black flower tattoo above her ankle. No black lily.

“Okay,” I say.

“You are funny,” she says.

I show her my shield. She doesn’t think that’s as funny.

The whole enamored-with-me facade immediately leaves her face, replaced with defiance, an eye roll. “Oh, c’mon, cop,” she says. “I give to you for free.”

I shake my head. “What’s your name?”

“My name is…Cherie.”

Yeah, and mine’s Leopold. “Cherie, I have you on solicitation. But you answer a couple questions and you walk away. Or I take you in, find out what your real name is, and you get a free night in the clink, maybe more depending on your record. What’s it gonna be?”

She doesn’t answer. But that’s an answer. I reach down to my feet, grab the file folder, remove the photograph of my Jane Doe’s ankle. “You see this tat?”

She takes the photo and looks at it.

“That mean anything to you?”

“No.” She shakes her head, shrugs. She’s being straight. No fear in her eyes, not the kind of fear she’d register if she recognized this.

“You ever see a girl with this ink on her?”

“No.”

“Ever heard any talk about ‘black lily girls’ or anything like that?”

She shakes her head again, hands me back the photo, concern on her face. Pretty obvious that it’s a crime scene photo, a victim photo. Prostitutes see a lot of kinky and dirty stuff, and they are no strangers to violence, but murder isn’t an everyday occurrence.

“I have one more question,” I say.

I ask her. She doesn’t want to tell me. Tears well up in her eyes. But eventually she tells me, with my promise that it won’t come back to her.

I drive her back to her spot on West Armitage and hand her a hundred dollars, all I have on me. She takes three of the twenty-dollar bills and stuffs them into her skirt. She takes the other two and slips them into her shoe, tucked under her foot, money her pimp will never see. She better hope he doesn’t.

Then she looks up at me, appearing several years younger than she did when she sauntered up to my car door twenty minutes ago. Looking like a young girl, a scared young girl.

“You have something else you could do?” I ask. “Somewhere else you could go? A family or friends or something?”

That seems almost amusing to her. “You are going to save me, Mr. Police Officer?”

“I’m just saying—”

“There is nowhere else to go.” She opens the door and gets out before I can say another word.

I watch her disappear into the shadows. Then I put the car in gear and start driving.

Chapter 43

JOSEF DROPS his cigarette to the sidewalk and stubs it out, counting the bills as he blows out smoke through pursed lips. “Forty? Only forty?” He shakes the bills in his hand. “For an hour?”

“That’s all he gave me, Yo.”

The woman, who uses the name Martina on the street, red-and-blue dyed hair in a bun, shifts her weight from one side to the other, knowing Josef is angry, knowing she screwed up.

“You get the money up front,” he says, gesturing with his hands. “I always tell you to get the money up front.” He shoves Martina backward. She nearly falls, balanced precariously enough already on her high heels.

“I did,” she says. “I told him he had half an hour. But he made me stay longer.”

“He made you stay. He made you…” Josef points to the car. “Get in. Now.”

“Yo, I told him—”

“Get in the car now .”

She walks past him, giving him a wide berth, wincing, but he doesn’t touch her. Not yet.

“The back seat,” he tells her when she tries for the front-seat passenger door.

“Yo, please—”

“Get in the back seat now.” He lunges for her, making a fist, feigning a strike. She rushes into the back seat, closes the door.

God, these girls. He walks around to the other side of the car, removes the leather strap tucked into the back of his pants, and gets in.

“Yo, please,” she says before he grabs her bun and shoves her face against the front passenger seat. Holding her in that position with his left hand, he gathers up the leather strap in his right, gripping each end in his fist, a makeshift whip.

Always the back, which the men don’t notice. Always through her shirt, the less likely to break skin. She takes the first strike between her shoulder blades with a whoosh of air, the second with a loud whimper, the third—

The illumination coming from the streetlight disappears, the interior of the car suddenly dark.

A shadow by the car, blocking the light. A man standing at the window.

Chapter 44

I SMACK my Maglite against the rear window, the glass shattering on impact. I drop the flashlight and reach through the window into the car, the man with the belt in his hand turning in my direction.