Her Last Scream

by J. A. Kerley

  During her pre-flight instructions, as they were laughingly called by the black woman with the owl glasses, Treeka had been told most of the links in the chain were women. There were some husband-and-wife teams and a few men. Some of the women were gay, as were some of the men, but in the system everyone was sexless, no interest in anything but helping women along the road to freedom. “So if you have anything against gays,” her instructor had pointedly told her, “get over it now.”

  “I don’t dislike anyone for being who God made them,” Treeka had said. “Except one.”

  “Are you hungry, dear?” the driver, her new benefactor, asked Treeka when they were fifteen minutes past the exchange.

  “No, I’m fine, thanks.”

  “I’ve got coffee in a Thermos. Valium, if your nerves are shaky. Or whiskey if you prefer. Hell, my nerves are shaky and I’m not on the run.”

  “Really, I’m fine. I just need to –”

  “I’ll stop talking so much, and you just lean back and relax, sleep. We’ve still got a couple hours to go, but then you’ll have a bright new place to live. At least until the next jump.”

  “I think you folks were sent by Jesus,” Treeka said. “Helping people get new lives in new places. I can’t wait until I get to –”

  The driver jammed her palm into the horn, the blast drowning out Treeka’s words. “No,” the driver said, releasing the horn. “Don’t tell me. Don’t tell anyone. That way only one link in the chain knows where you are at any given moment. You don’t want him finding you, do you?”

  “I’m sorry. I was told a dozen times not to say where I was coming from or going.”

  “Don’t worry about it, dear. It’s all about keeping you safe.”

  Treeka looked at the woman’s hands. Large and hard, like a rancher’s hands. The woman was tanned, too, like she spent a lot of time in the sun. Even her raspy voice sounded sizzled in the hard sun. A lesbian for sure, Treeka thought. It didn’t bother her a bit; Treeka figured that, given the hatred Tommy had for lesbians – though he’d probably never knowingly spoken to one – they must be pretty good people.

  “Half-past nine,” the driver said, breaking into Treeka’s thoughts. “We’ll be there by midnight. You can get a shower; I’ll fix us up a big snack. Tomorrow, well … you’ll love what I’ve got planned for you.”

  The woman started laughing.

  Chapter 26

  Q: What’s the first thing a woman does when she gets back from the battered women’s clinic?

  A: The god-damned dishes if she knows what’s good for her.

  Setting his briefcase and laptop on the desk, Sinclair fired up his iMac and hurried to the chat room.

  1 Member online

  Figuring HPDrifter was lurking silently and waiting for company, he sipped his single malt, took a toke from his joint, and entered his password.

  2 Members online

  PROMALE: Another day surrounded by women. I had to kiss one on its filthy cheek to display camaraderie. I’m living a false life, a chain built from lies, having to interact with these objects, to pretend they’re fully sentient humans.

  HPDRIFTER: Sorry you had to touch one without getting a blowjob in return. I’ve been camping alone beside a mountain stream filled with trout. I didn’t see a woman all weekend and yet I was a half-hour from a town filled with them, the worst kind: educated (supposedly). More than half the undergraduates in our once-proud universities are women! The goddamn quotas push them through the doors like so many grunting swine.

  3 Members online

  RAISEHELL: The job I WANTED got handed to a woman. I been working toward it day and night but the goddamn supervisor handed it over to a fucking woman. I been working there ten years, she’s been there four.

  HPDRIFTER: The time will come when justice will prevail. Mark my words.

  RAISEHELL: I’M READY! TELL ME MORE.

  HPDRIFTER: A New Time is about to dawn. We’re going to undo the sins of the past. I give you my solemn pledge you will see the effect of these words.

  RAISEHELL: When is this going down? What is it?

  HPDRIFTER: I can’t speak freely because the FemiNazis have castrated the First Amendment. But major changes are in the wind.

  RAISEHELL: About fucking time! OH SHIT … got to go, dog just puked on the floor.

  2 Members online

  PROMALE: Now that we’re alone, Drifter, I have something I’d like to say.

  HPDRIFTER: I remember you were about to say something the other day. Why didn’t you?

  PROMALE: It concerns one of us … a regular visitor to this holy room: RAISEHELL. I worry about him, Drifter.

  HPDRIFTER: He’s been a solid member of this room for months. Explain yourself.

  PROMALE: His grammar is erratic one day, good the next. Sometimes he uses numbers for words, sometimes not. One day he puts exclamation marks everywhere, the next time he barely uses them.

  Sinclair leaned back and watched the screen as a minute elapsed.

  HPDRIFTER: Conclusion?

  PROMALE: There are two RAISEHELLS. At least.

  This time three minutes passed. Sinclair relit a dead joint and stared at the screen until lines appeared.

  HPDRIFTER: I’ve considered your thesis and find merit. You suspect RAISEHELL is a fake? A plant?

  PROMALE: The FemiNazis gather anything they can get against us. I think we’ve got a spy in the house, brother.

  Chapter 27

  A half-hour later Rein and I parked in front of the center in an eight-year-old Chevy pickup Cruz had borrowed from a colleague. I wore paint-spattered cut-offs and a T-shirt advertising cigarettes, one of those freebies handed out by tobacco companies near high schools and colleges. My role was Accidental Samaritan. Rein was Battered Woman. My job was to set the scene, hers to upstage me and be sheltered by the center tonight.

  Harry had another act to add, but that came tomorrow.

  I looked across the street at the slender two-story bar, the Beacon, seeing no one at the front window, no one on the small porch upstairs either, just a lonely blue bike. Rickety metal stairs angled down the side of the building. The place recalled an apartment I once rented on the periphery of the University of Alabama, tumbling down the stairs a time or two after nights on the town.

  I gave Rein a good-luck hug then reached into my pocket for the vial of fake blood, splashing her blouse as she dabbed drops into her nose. I took her hand and guided her to the front door of the Women’s Crisis Center of Boulder.

  “Showtime,” I whispered, one-arming the door open and pushing through, holding Rein under my arm as if keeping her up. She played fumble-footed, disoriented, like she’d been pulled from a garbage compactor. There were two women talking, one behind a desk, one leaning the wall to the side. The sitting woman was fortyish, square-built, with short red hair and dark eyes. The standing woman was in her mid-thirties, slender and black, with delicate features and round, Elton John-sized glasses. Their eyes went wide at our entrance.

  “What is it?” the square woman said, jumping up. I swung Rein around to drop her into one of the chairs in the tiny room, barely space for a desk and four mismatched chairs. She flopped forward and tucked into herself, a portrait in misery.

  “She’s my neighbor,” I said. “Y’all got to do something. She told, uh, this guy she wanted to leave him. He went crazy and started pounding on her.”

  “Is he nearby?” the square-built woman asked, jumping to the front door and throwing the lock.

  “No. He beat and booked.”

  The square-built woman knelt beside Rein and took her hand. “What’s your name, dear?”

  Rein wiped her face with the back of her hand, wet, she’d made herself cry real tears. “S -Sondra, Sondra Jakes.”

  “My name is Carol,” the square woman said. “That’s Meelia over there. Are you all right, Sondra? Is your nose broken?”

  Rein started sniffling, like trying to grab hold of herself but not there yet. I leaned in again. �
�I had medical training in the Army, ma’am. Nothing’s broken and I got the bleeding stopped on the way over.”

  Carol looked at me and nodded. I’d jumped from unknown quantity to someone with the intelligence to understand first aid. We wanted to make Rein look hurt, but didn’t want paramedics called.

  “Do you know the signs of concussion?” the woman asked me.

  “I’ve made three pupillary checks and she’s OK. I stopped at a gas station and told her to pee and look at it. No blood.”

  I’m not sure what all that meant, but it added to my cred. “You don’t think she’s injured enough to call an ambulance?” Carol asked.

  I waved it off. “The guy wanted to scare her bad, but not break anything.”

  A frown from the lady in the owl glasses. “No one called the police?”

  “The guy had a gun, ma’am, the grip hanging outta his pocket. I never seen so many doors close so fast.”

  “But couldn’t someone make an anonymous call to –”

  I motioned the woman named Meelia to follow me to the corner. Carol sensed I was about to say something important to the situation and followed.

  “She called the guy her boyfriend,” I whispered. “But he’s really her, uh, pimp. Everyone on the street’s scared of him because he’s a psycho. I heard rumors about him, nasty stuff.”

  “Like what?” Meelia asked.

  “Two women that worked for him disappeared. There one day, gone the next. Tee Bull – that’s his street name – laughing about them being where no one would find them. He didn’t mean California.”

  Both shot a look at Rein, then at each other. I said, “Sondra’s a really good person, lady. I think she got jammed up, had to do what she had to do. We live in a rough neighborhood.”

  “She’s on drugs, though. Right?” Meelia asked.

  Most hookers are on drugs. Some get hooked before they enter the life, selling themselves to pay for the habit. Then it becomes the only way to get through the days and nights. An addicted woman wasn’t allowed into the system, the addiction making her erratic and a threat to everyone concerned. But we had cooked up a story that brought Rein in clean and, even better, made her a candidate for redemption.

  “She was on dope once,” I said, setting up the story. “You could tell by talking to her. But for the past couple months she’s been off the shit – you can tell that, too. I thought she’d stopped doing that, uh, other thing. Hooking. Until he showed up.”

  The women went back to Rein, taking a chair to each side.

  Carol said, “Sondra? Are you using? We don’t judge anyone here at the center, but we need you to tell the truth. Truth is how we help you.”

  Rein unfolded from herself, her face a mix of fear and determination.

  “I quit drugs, every one. I been to that twelve-step over on Riser Avenue. I did it all in secret and on my own. I been clean of dope for two months and the thought of ever doing that stuff again makes me sick. I even quit smoking and drinking, everything. My baby sister goes to high school and I been borrowing her books so I can get my diploma. I took the practice test two weeks ago. The teacher said I’d nail the real test. All I got left to do is get away from Tee Bull and I can have a real life.”

  “What’s that mean to you, Sondra?” Carol asked. “Real life?”

  “I wanna go to school and be a nurse. I did my own study of the job market and there’s a real shortage, so I can get a job right away when I get certified. I wanna work at a doctor’s office, a pediatrician. I wanna get married to a guy who likes to laugh and tell stories. I wanna family and a house with grass in the yard. I can do it, too. I know I can.”

  Rein’s delivery was brilliant: street rough with the incidental polish of someone driven to read, to grab the bootstraps and pull. I gestured the lady named Carol to the side.

  “Can you help her?” I begged. “Can you hide her?”

  “We can give her a place to stay for a night or two.”

  I shook my head like the offer was totally inadequate. “Lady, if you saw Tee Bull, you’d know she needs to be locked away in a Brink’s truck.”

  I left Rein at the center, a one-woman show whose opening-night performance had to convince the women that she was in dire need of a disappearance in days, not weeks. Returning to the truck, I felt hairs prickle on the back of my neck and checked behind me, to the sides, seeing only darkness and the interior lights of the bar across the street, its second-floor windows dark and curtained.

  From this point on, everyone was suspect.

  Chapter 28

  We met with Cruz the next morning. Perhaps knowing our Southern systems wouldn’t take well to tofu smoothies or whatever fuels the bodies of Boulderites in the a.m., she took us to a buffet joint where we could have eggs and bacon while Cruz nibbled prosciutto-girdled melon.

  “When officer Early comes home, so to speak, we have a special suitcase for her. It has a powerful GPS device built into a false bottom. The satellites keep track and you watch on an enabled phone or laptop. You’ll be living out of the vehicle hours, maybe days at a time.”

  Cruz was dead-on about living in the car: Staying close to Rein meant staying in motion. If she got to a safe house and it had a low threat index, we might be able to get a motel room if one was close, but everything would be dictated by circumstance.

  “How do you see this going down?” Harry asked after Cruz had filled us in on other planned aspects of the operation.

  “officer Early should return from the center’s safe house in a day or two. She’ll have to do the act a few more times, bring the threat home to the folks at the center. You’re on stage tonight, right, Detective Nautilus?”

  “So I’m told.”

  “Break a leg,” Cruz said.

  “This looks ridiculous, Carson,” Harry said, staring into the full-length mirror. Ten hours had passed since breakfast with Cruz and we’d re-played our roles a dozen times. My partner was wearing a purple pinstriped suit with extra padding in the shoulders. We’d found the improbable getup at a costume store, maybe created for XX-size Dick Tracy wannabes or Sky Masterson impersonators. Harry was born with shoulders you could set pumpkins on, the outsize pads making his profile Frankenstinian. His silk shirt was silver lamé, open to the third button. The chains around his neck were fake gold, but we didn’t think anyone would get close enough for an appraisal. Ditto the rings on Harry’s sausage-thick fingers; dime-store crap, but they sparkled like the first ten seconds of cheap champagne.

  “Stop whining,” I said, standing behind him like a tailor, picking lint from his collar. I reached to the box at my back and revealed a black fedora with scarlet band, size 7 7/8. When I’d tried it on, the chapeau had fallen to the bridge of my nose. I set it atop Harry’s noggin, a perfect fit.

  “Your crown, sire,” I proclaimed. “Thou royal pimpness is complete.”

  Tonight’s performance involved shortening the length of time it took for a potential runner to be accepted by the center. We’d established Rein as smart enough to get off drugs and make something of herself, and lacking family in the area to either turn to or keep her anchored. My concerned-neighbor scenario had established a viable threat to Rein’s safety via her procurer. She was, in short, a candidate for the underground railroad.

  Now it was time for the final straw, ratcheting up the threat index. Harry was in costume, Amica Cruz had supplied the wheels, a ride confiscated from a fer-real pimp in Denver a month back: a chartreuse Hummer with twenty-four-inch spinning rims and two month’s worth of Zimbabwe’s chromium exports. The upholstery was fake leopard. There was a wet bar in the rear. The buggy sat outside our door where it seemed an attractant for a group of nameplate-wearing conventioneers from Cincinnati, and I had to twice shoo them away and wipe sweaty fingerprints from the smoked windows.

  I reached into a bag on the nightstand and picked up the final piece of subterfuge. “Hey, bro,” I said, tossing a small package to Harry. “Catch.”

  He stared into
his hand. “Grillz?”

  Grillz were metal jewelry worn over the teeth; like pants worn around the thighs, medallions the size of pies, and side-facing ball caps, they were another fine gift from the hip-hop culture. Harry slipped the monstrosity over his teeth, turned to me and stretched back his lips, showing a row of silver fangs studded with diamelles. The effect was freakish, a grillz-wearer’s metallic grin as unsettling as a person with no irises, just white.

  “Well?” Harry asked.

  “You look like a piranha.”

  He thought about the simile. “Seems to fit.”

  Time to boogie. I went to the window, the parking lot now dark, the conventioneers off to steaks and a strip club. Harry snapped his lapels, canted the hat to a menacing angle, and checked the mirror one more time.

  “You got my back?” he asked.

  “I’ll be at the bar across the street.”

  Harry had to walk a fine line: menacing without being call-the-cops threatening. The last thing we wanted was for the folks at the center to bellow for the constabulary, resulting in our outing. I’d be nearby in case we had to explain the charade.

  Harry slipped to the Hummer and rumbled away. I pulled on a University of Colorado ball cap and followed, blowing past Harry a minute later at a stoplight, not honking nor waving. I knew my partner was generating the imperious attitude copped by whore-sellers since creating the World’s Oldest Profession. I figured glittery-eyed pimps had crawled like flies through the camps housing the builders of the pyramids, offering human wares to masters and slaves alike.

  Within minutes I was inside the Beacon, a narrow bar with a slender visage on the street, its sole sign announcing Fifty Beers! We’d scoped it out yesterday, finding a quiet neighborhood bar built around local brews. I’d figured I could grab one of the two front-window tables and keep an eye on the women’s center a hundred paces across the street. Even better would have been the second-floor balcony, but given the bicycle slung up there, it was someone’s apartment, student housing being ubiquitous in the university area.