“Yeah, they look like they're doing great here,” Tammy said. “Fuck you, Dan, I'm calling the cops.”
He clamped his hand around her throat, pulled her face close to his, and said, “If you do that, you stupid twat, I'll kill you. And just in case you don't care about your own useless life, think about the kids. Their families owe money to the guys who bring them in. If they don't produce, the snakeheads take it out on their families. Capisce?”
She nodded, but he didn't let her go for a few seconds, just to make a point. To make the point further, he unzipped his fly and forced her head down. “You open your mouth, it's for this. ” When he let her up, she could see, through watery eyes, the bouncer loading the girls into an old van.
A few seconds later, flames blew out the windows.
Dan drove her home.
She didn't go to the cops. She went to the insurance company and told them that she saw him set the fire, that she could put him at the scene. It was a mistake, she'd tell Teddy later. She wanted to get back at Dan Silver, and she wanted them to look harder at the fire. Maybe they'd find something that would put them onto what was really happening there.
She did something else.
She looked for Luce.
Tammy went out to the strawberry fields, los campos fresas, and looked for the girl. Her first few trips, all she saw were the workers in the fields, and then one day, she left the new strip club she was working at and went straight out to the fields, arriving there shortly before dawn.
She saw a bunch of men leave the fields and walk down to the side of the river, where a stand of tall reeds hid the men from view. She drove down the road to the other side, parked her car, and walked in a little ways.
Tammy waited until all the field-workers had gone away and then went in. A Mexican man with a shotgun went to stop her, but Tammy ignored him and he let her pass. She found Luce on a “bed” of stamped-down reeds. Tammy took some hand wipes out of her bag and helped the girl clean herself off.
Speaking broken Spanish and English, she and the girl talked, but mostly she held the girl and stroked her hair. The man with the shotgun told her she'd have to go, that the pimps would come very soon to take the girls back to where they lived.
“Where do they live?” Tammy asked.
“All over the place. The men move them around,” he told her. “They go to different fields all day, or to hidden ‘factories,’ sometimes to the mojado camps at night. But they always bring them to this place, the strawberry fields, at sunrise every day.” The local pedophiles had a cute name for it. They called it “The Dawn Patrol.”
The man with the shotgun told Tammy again that she had to go.
“Tell her I'll be back,” Tammy said. “What's her name?”
The man, Pablo, asked the girl her name.
“Luce.”
“Luce, I'm Tammy. I'll come back to see you, okay?”
Tammy did go back, three or four times a week. Pablo always escorted her in, and even the pimps who brought the girls in the van came to tolerate her when they saw that she wasn't going to go to the police. She took Luce-and all the girls-food, clothing, cold medication, books. She took them condoms. She took them female love and affection.
It wasn't enough.
Tammy confided in Angela. Told her all about Luce and the strawberry fields.
“They need medical care,” Tammy said. “They need a doctor.”
Angela took her to see Teddy. He had done Angela's boobs-she had done him to get the insider discount.
Teddy didn't believe her at first, thought she was a psycho. He felt sorry for her, figured she had been an abused child who had twisted her trauma into delusion. He was going to recommend a good psychiatrist, but Tammy challenged him to go and see for himself.
So Teddy rode up one day with her. He wanted to call the police. Tammy begged him not to, told him why. What she needed, what the girls needed, was a doctor.
“I'm hoping that's you,” she said.
It was.
He went back again and again. At first, Pablo was hesitant, and the van drivers absolutely forbade it. But Teddy overcame their resistance with wads of cash and assurances of silence, and the men weren't total animals.
They had some compassion, and Teddy convinced them that it was in their interest to have the girls checked for venereal disease, that it was just good business.
“The girls are raped multiple time a day, six days a week,” Teddy tells Boone now. “They give them Sundays off. The men pay five to ten dollars to have sex with them. It doesn't sound like this would add up to a lot of money, but multiply it by several locations a day, all over California. Hell, all over the country, more and more. Now you're talking serious money. The variety of potential and actual STDs is staggering. No matter what we do, a third of these girls are going to become HIV-positive. And then there's vaginal trauma… anal tears. Not to mention the day-to-day garden-variety colds, flu, respiratory infections, hygiene issues. You could set up a clinic there and staff it twenty-four/seven and you'd still be overwhelmed.”
But Teddy did what he could.
He did set up a clinic. He rented a full-time room at the motel and stocked it with antibiotics and other drugs, hiding them in locked cabinets, as otherwise the room would be broken into and the drugs stolen. He went up there two, three, five times a week as his schedule allowed, usually with Tammy.
The pimps tolerated them.
As long as they got the girls in and out, as long as the girls met their schedule, as long as nobody breathed a word, it was okay. Just. There was always the threat that the operation would be shut down, and Teddy, no matter how hard he tried to argue, no matter what kind of cash he threw at them, was never, ever allowed anywhere near the “safe houses” where the girls lived.
“‘Safe houses,’” he says to Boone. “There's a tasty irony. More like petri dishes, fecund hothouses for bacteria. If I could get to them and institute just some basic hygienic procedures, we could eliminate at least half of the chronic diseases they suffer from.”
But it was no good. They could never find out where the girls were housed, and they were afraid to push it. And the girls themselves changed all the time. They were shuffled around, disappearing, sometimes returning, new girls arriving every few weeks.
It made Tammy crazy with fear.
Once, Luce went missing for two weeks and Teddy had to sedate Tammy. When the girl returned, Tammy swore that she couldn't go through that again, that they had to do something.
“She loved the girl,” Teddy says. “Do you have kids?”
Boone shakes his head.
“I have three,” Teddy says. “By a couple of different wives. You fall in love with them, you know? And the thought of anything happening to them…”
She decided to take Luce.
Tammy and Angela decided that they would take the girl and raise her themselves. They knew they just couldn't take her-that would endanger Luce's family back in Guanajuato-so they decided to buy her.
What kind of life could Luce have otherwise? If she survived the chronic rape, the STDs, the trauma, the exposure, the beatings, the malnutrition, psychological abuse, emotional deprivation, if she lived through her teenage years, then into her twenties, what could she expect? To be moved to an actual brothel? To a sweatshop? If she went through all of that without going to crack or getting hooked on meth, even then, what kind of life would she have?
What's the price of a twelve-year-old girl?
Twenty thousand dollars.
Because they not only had to pay for the price of a lucrative working girl; they also had to pay the always- accruing interest on her debt, the money she owed the smugglers for getting her into the country, and the interest on the debt she owed for room and board.
