but some of the other Naughty Teens had been in nondescript GND outfits so I was hoping I’d be able to find something besides stripper-wear and cheerleader costumes.
The first few doors I opened led to more sets. A schoolroom, an office, a prison with little wooden cells. By far the creepiest was a little girl’s bedroom, complete with cute plush animals and a pink canopy bed. There were also a few minimally furnished studio apartments that looked like trick pads. All of them were empty.
I went downstairs to try some of the doors on the first floor. The locks on these doors were expensive and new, and there was more than one on each door. The first door I unlocked led to what I initially mistook for an empty apartment. There was no furniture in the room I could see from the front door, yet the lights were on. I was about to shut the door and try another when a blonde head peered around the doorless entry to a second room on the left.
“Hello?” I said.
A girl came out into the main room. She was naked. She had a pretty face but was clearly exhausted and her skinny, underdeveloped body was mottled with bruises and scratches. She made no attempt to cover herself. Her eyes were skittish, like Lia’s had been. She didn’t say anything.
“Do you speak English?” I asked.
Her lack of response answered for her, but at the sound of my voice, two other girls appeared behind her. They were also naked, and also didn’t seem to care. Any dignity or shyness had long since worn away. They were silent, resigned.
I quickly searched the tiny unit and found absolutely nothing inside. No clothes, no furniture, no toiletries, nothing at all. Just these three naked girls.
It was a pretty smart set-up Ridgeway had going here. This was the perfect place to keep illegal girls locked down tight, providing privacy for the johns and the shoots. In a neighborhood like this, nobody thought twice about heavy security bars and multiple locks. The neighbors would never imagine all that security wasn’t to keep people out but to keep them in.
I went down the row of doors, opening them one after the other. The girls were housed three per unit, fifteen total. They were all pale and scared and painfully young. I would have been very surprised if even half of them were over eighteen. The girls were all naked and there were no clothes or shoes in any of their units. Not so much as a blanket or a towel. There was something hideously brilliant about keeping them demoralized that way, leaving them naked, making them sleep on the floor.
It took a lot of non-verbal coaxing to get them all out of their little carpeted prisons.
“Does anybody speak English?” I asked, once I had herded all the shivering girls into the central garden.
“Yes,” a tall, awkward brunette replied.
“A little bit,” said a bottom-heavy blonde, indicating a little bit between her thumb and forefinger.
“Okay,” I said speaking slow and clear. “Where are clothes?”
The brunette pointed to a left corner unit on the ground floor. When I unlocked the door, I found a dressing room filled with racks of slutty dresses and costumes. It was not unlike the Sissy Boudoir at Ulka’s except the clothes were in smaller sizes.
“Everyone get dressed,” I said.
The girls obediently did as I asked and the ones who didn’t understand followed the examples of the ones who did. They were so used to doing what they were told that it made me angry.
I had hoped there would be some plain good-girl outfits but if there were any, they kept them somewhere else.
“Okay, I said. “Everyone dressed?”
I surveyed my little hooker army. Each girl was clad in a trashy spandex dress and plastic platform shoes or vinyl hot pants and a halter top. It was so preposterous that you had to laugh, but I suddenly thought of one particular motherfucker who would not be laughing when he saw them.
I led the girls up to the dungeon where Vukasin was manacled. In my absence, he had struggled so fiercely that he’d knocked the bench over on its side. His wrists were bleeding, but he had been unable to free himself.
I bent down to retrieve the open straight razor from the carpet and handed it to the blonde who understood English a little bit. She didn’t need her English to understand what I had in mind. I was pleased to see, finally, flashes of defiance and life in fifteen pairs of eyes as understanding swept over the girls on a tide of foreign whispers.
As I turned away, I could hear Vukasin’s muffled, impotent squeaks through the gag and frantic thumping as he struggled to get away from what he had coming. I left the girls to their revenge. I had my own to think about.
On my way out, I stopped off in the wardrobe room. The bare bones of a plan were starting to take shape in my mind. I ditched my dirty jeans and wiggled into a g-string bikini with easy-off plastic clasps. Over the bikini I pulled on a shiny black stretch vinyl minidress. There was a plastic toolbox filled with Wet N Wild 99-cent make-up. I quickly slapped on a thick layer of war paint and topped it off with a cherry red Bettie Page-style wig. I jammed my feet into sky-high stripper heels and then covered it all up with Vukasin’s leather trench coat. The coat still smelled like him. It made me feel completely the opposite of the way wearing Malloy’s coat had made me feel.
As I turned to go, I found myself facing a full-length mirror. Looking in that mirror, I suddenly knew my plan would work. I understood exactly what I had been doing wrong. All this time I’d been trying to be some kind of action movie tough guy. I’d tried to be Malloy with tits and look where it got me. There was only one way I was going to get Ridgeway. It was the only way I knew. A girl’s gotta use her natural skills.
Sneaky Pete’s is to Eye Candy what your local taco truck is to Spago. Cheap, nasty and lowbrow. Full nude and no holds barred. I never danced there; frankly, you can hardly call what the girls do there “dancing.”
As I pulled into the lot beside the sleazy little edifice, I checked my new face in the rearview mirror. I straightened the glossy red wig on my head, touched up my black cherry lips and pressed down my the corners of my false eyelashes. There was no time to spare. Only twenty minutes till closing.
I went inside and asked to see the manager. There was a familiar stink inside of sweat and baby oil and dead-end lives. The men clustered in the shadows, nursing overpriced soft drinks and pretending not to notice one another. A tiny, flat-chested girl worked the single stage. She was a brunette with big eyes, hardly more than a child. Her hipbones were so sharp they looked painful. She wore nothing but a silver g-string and moved her skinny limbs with a slow, spacey grace, like she was underwater. Van Halen’s “Little Dreamer” crackled through the cheap speakers.
“Yeah?” the manager said, appearing suddenly at my elbow. “You looking for work?”
He was a burly biker right out of central casting. Beard. Ponytail. Beer gut. Tattoos. He looked like one of the first three guys the hero has to fight before he can get to the real bad guy.
“I know it’s late,” I said, making my voice and posture all submissive and needy. “But I was hoping you’d let me audition tonight and then if you like me...” I gave a shy little smile and fingered a strand of red synthetic hair. “Maybe you can give me some shifts this weekend.”
“No problem, sugar,” he said with a gap-toothed grin. “You’re up next. It’s g-strings on the stage but you go full nude in the champagne rooms. Extras are up to you.” He winked and gestured toward the DJ booth. “Go tell Lenny your name and what song you want to dance to.”
I headed over to the DJ booth and that’s when I saw Ridgeway, sitting along the rail on the far right flanked by two men. One was the messy-haired thug who had carried me into the dungeon and the other a guy I’d never seen. Shaved head, goatee, bad tattoos. I didn’t care. I only had eyes for Ridgeway.
I felt that cold rush, that jittery crush-like feeling in my belly, and part of me wanted to bolt. Maybe I was crazy to think I could do this. But I’d never be able to live with myself if I didn’t try. I stared at the back of Ridgeway’s head like hate alone was enough to kill him. He didn’t notice me.
“Hey,” a voice said. “How you doing, beautiful?”
I turned toward the voice. It was the DJ, who, by some bizarre coincidence turned out to be the lanky hotdog with the braids who had come to help Thick Vic get Roxette out of Taylor’s bathroom. I wondered if the eviction had been successful, or if Roxette was still in there digging into her leg with the bloody toothbrush. He clearly did not
