mortgage, girl.”
“I could pay you,” she suggested, placing a hand on my thigh. “I got seventy-fi’e dollars in my purse. And, and you said you wanted some company.”
“No,” I said. “I mean . . . you are a fine young thing, but I’m honest and a father too.”
The teenager’s face went blank, but I could see that her mind was racing. My appearance had been a possibility that she’d already considered. Not me exactly but some man who either knew her or wanted to save her. After twenty blow jobs a night for two weeks, she’d have to be thinking about rescue — and about the perils that came along with such an act of desperation. Porky could find her anywhere in Southern California.
“Porky ain’t gonna let me go,” she said. “He cut up one girl that tried to leave him. Cassandra. He cut up her face.”
She put a hand to her cheek. It wasn’t a pretty face.
“Oh,” I said, “I’m almost sure the pig man will listen to reason.”
It was my smile that gave Chevette Johnson hope.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“At the back of the barbershop.”
I took the dull gray .38 from the glove compartment and the keys from the ignition.
Cupping my hand around the girl’s chin, I said, “You wait right here. I don’t wanna have to look for you again.”
She nodded into my palm and I went off down the alley.
TALL AND LANKY LaTerry Klegg stood in the doorway of the back porch of Masters and Broad Barber Shop. He looked like a deep brown praying mantis standing in a pool of yellow cream. Klegg had a reputation for being fast and deadly, so I came up on him quickly, slamming the side of my pistol against his jaw.
He went down and I thought of Bonnie for a moment. I wondered, as I looked into the startled face of Porky the Pimp, why she had not called me.
Porky was seated in an old barber’s chair that had been moved out on the porch to make room for a newer model, no doubt.
“Who the fuck are you?” the pimp said in a frightened alto voice. He was the color of a pig too, a sickly pinkish brown.
I answered by pressing the barrel of my pistol against his left cheekbone.
“What?” he squeaked.
“Chevette Johnson,” I said. “Either you let up or I lay you down right here and now.”
I meant it. I was ready to kill him. I wanted to kill him. But even while I stood there on the verge of murder, it came to me that Bonnie would never call. She was too proud and hurt.
“Take her,” Porky said.
My finger was constricting on the trigger.
“Take her!”
I moved my hand three inches to the right and fired. The bullet only nicked the outer earlobe, but his hearing on that side would never be the same. Porky went down to the floor, holding his head and crying out. I kicked him in his gut and walked back down the way I’d come.
On the way to my car, I passed three women in short skirts and high heels that had come running. They gave me a wide berth, seeing the pistol in my hand.
“SO WHY’D YOU LEAVE HOME LIKE THAT?” I asked Chevette at the all-night hamburger stand on Beverly.
She’d ordered a chili burger and fries. I nursed a cream soda.
“They wouldn’t let me do nuthin’,” she whined. “Daddy want me to wear long skirts and ponytails. He wouldn’t even let me talk to a boy on the phone.”
Even in a potato sack you could have seen that Chevette was a woman. It had been a long time since she had been a member of the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.
I drove her to my office and let her sleep on my new blue sofa while I napped, dreaming of Bonnie, in my office chair.
In the morning I called Martel and told him everything — except that Chevette was listening in.
“What you mean, walkin’ the streets?” he asked.
“You know what I mean.”
“A prostitute?”
“You still want her back?” I asked.
“Of course I want my baby back.”
“No, Marty. I can bring her back, but what you gonna get is a full-grown woman, not no child, not no baby. She gonna need you to let her grow up. She gonna need you to see what she is. ’Cause it won’t make a difference her bein’ back home if you don’t change.”
“She my child, Easy,” he said with deadly certainty.
“The child is gone, Marty. Woman’s all that’s left.”
He broke down then and so did Chevette. She buried her face in a blue cushion and cried.
