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.
“How did you owe Joe?” he asked, pouring Bacardi and Coke over the small hotel ice cubes.
She took the glass and drank a long sip of the sweet mixture. Then another. She clearly meant to finish the drink before continuing. Will poured himself a steaming cup of tea, added sugar and lemon. The scent of Earl Grey wafted through the bedroom.
Cheryl finished her rum and Coke and held out the glass for a refill. Will mixed another-stronger this time- then took a sip of tea and sat on the edge of the bed.
“How did you owe him, Cheryl?”
“You don’t just walk away from the kind of work I was doing at the club in Jackson,” she said quietly. “I owed them money, and they wanted me working it off. When I started dancing in Metairie, they heard about it. They sent a couple of guys down to get me. Joe offered to pay my debts, but they wouldn’t go for it. They wanted me back at the club. The guy who owned the place… he had a thing for me.”
“So what happened?”
A little laugh rippled the bruised flesh of her abdomen. “Joe convinced these guys to change their minds.”
“How did he do that?”
“Convincingly.”
“And they left you alone?”
“Those guys did.”
“And?”
“The owner sent another guy for me. To bring me back. A really bad guy.”
“And what happened?”
Another swallow. “Joe punched his ticket.”
“You mean he killed him?”
Cheryl looked Will right in the eye. “That’s what I mean. Messy, too. So that anybody else they sent would know what he was getting into. You know? And it worked. Nobody else came. I was free.”
“You weren’t exactly free. You’d just traded one master for another.”
“Hey, I ain’t nobody’s slave.”
“Who are you trying to convince?”
“Shut up.”
