by Gwen Florio
“That bastard,” Lola nearly shrieked. “I’ll punch his fat face in!”
The outburst brought both Dawg and Charlotte into a brief scuffle at the door, each trying to shove past the other into the room. Dawg had height and hard muscle but Charlotte, as Lola had only belatedly begun to realize, had sheer meanness on her side. She burst first into the room, brandishing a syringe.
“Do I have to calm you down? Do I have to?”
Lola tried to flatten herself against the wall behind the bed. She couldn’t. Tina had gotten there first. She felt the girl’s shuddering breaths against her back.
“Now, listen.” Twin infernos burned in Charlotte’s eyes. “Lunch-time’s coming. It’s about to get busy in here. I can’t have any trouble from you two.” She jabbed the needle toward Lola, who slammed backward, ignoring an “oof” from Tina. “Something tells me it would be smarter to give you this. But we’re looking at a busy night and we’re still short a girl and Princess here is on reserve for a special order. We might need you, and the customers don’t like girls who just lie there. You catch my drift?”
Tina began her whispered mantra again. “MommyMommy Mommy.”
Charlotte folded her arms across her chest. The needle’s tip glinted. “Do we understand one another?”
Lola couldn’t believe she was capable of speech. But the word floated into the room. “Completely.”
The door closed, almost, behind them. Lola eased away from the wall. Tina fell to the mattress, incapable of forming even the single word. “M-m-m,” she stammered. Lola took her by the shoulders, eased her upright. Put her hands to either side of Tina’s face, her thumbs beneath Tina’s slack jaw, and pushed until Tina’s lips were mashed together. Held it until Tina’s teeth stopped chattering.
“I talked to Jan earlier today,” she whispered. She watched the notion swim past Tina’s dull gaze, noted the slight jerk as the idea took hold. “Jan,” she said again, trying to force Tina’s thoughts away from her unthinkable present back to that other world. She gave Tina another second or two to recollect Jan, the newspaper, her whole previous life. She checked an impulse to slap the girl. The shock might bring her back. But if things didn’t work out, there’d be more than enough slaps and worse in Tina’s future. And—she pushed the thought away—her own. She lowered her face to Tina’s and forced the girl to look into her eyes.
“You need to focus. We don’t have much time.”
“Much time for what?” Tina asked. Good question, thought Lola. If only she had an answer. The one she came up with surprised her almost as much as Tina’s accepting nod.
“Until we figure out how to get the hell out of here. Because that’s what we’re going to do.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Lunchtime, shift changes, any time the men are off—those are the worst.” Lola had asked Tina to tell her the trailer’s routine, mostly as a way to help Tina refocus, and to give herself time to think. In her brief time in the trailer before Lola’s own unplanned arrival, Tina had managed a quick conversation with one of the other girls from the rez, Josephine’s niece. “Nancy. She played basketball with me for a while. She wasn’t as far gone into drugs as the others. I guess that makes it worse for her.”
“Why?”
“Mama keeps them drugged up, just high enough not to really care.” Lola remembered Dave’s description of a girl who lay passive, unmoving. She already had assumed the girl was unwilling. Drugs added an ominous extra layer of the inability to protest.
“So how come we aren’t?”
“Maybe she thinks she got you good enough to keep you in line.” Tina pointed with her lips to the goose eggs from Charlotte’s pistol-whipping. “And me”—her eyes went dark and flat—“the special customer wants me wide awake.”
“We’re going to be long gone by the time that damn special customer gets here.” And if they weren’t, Lola vowed, she’d find some way, no matter how unlikely the chance, to put a hurt on the special customer. She’d heard tales overseas about men paying a premium to have sex with a virgin. It made her sick then. Thinking about that being applied to Tina took her beyond sick to murderous. But it was also distracting. Lola gave herself the same advice she’d given Tina: Focus. “What about the other girls?”
“Nancy, she was trying to get clean when they snatched her. She tells Mama she doesn’t need the stuff, pretends she doesn’t mind the men. That’s what Judith did. She’d worked so hard to get clean, and then they drugged her. She was so scared of getting hooked again. She told them she, um, worked better without it.” Lola recalled the inflamed scratch across Swanny’s face, his lewd appraisal of Judith’s performance. “And it worked. She stayed clearheaded and got away. Nancy was hoping to do the same thing. But now there’s somebody by the door all the time. And they leave the bedroom doors cracked even when the men come. Nancy says if they hear talking instead of”—the next word came out in a whisper—“fucking, Dawg or Mama will bust in, make sure nobody’s plotting anything.”
“Nobody’s plotting anything now, that’s for sure.”
Around them, the trailer heaved and creaked like a ship at sea, buffeted by the wind without and the primal surges within. The men, at least, were quick. This bunch, Tina had explained, comprised day workers around town on their lunch breaks. Every few minutes a groan would sound, followed by relative silence. Then, the rustle of clothing being donned, the creak of a door, and heavy footsteps passing one another in the hall as the next man hurried toward his own brief assignation. From the direction of what Lola assumed was the living room or kitchen, Lola heard voices.
“C’mon, Mama. When you getting more girls? You promised.”
“If she does get ’em, I get first crack. Right, Mama?”
Charlotte’s voice was full, flirty. “Only because you paid. And not first crack. Somebody paid a lot more than you for that particular privilege.” Lola wondered how many personalities the woman had. Prim housewife, fiendish madam, and now this new sultry version. All combined, she supposed, to make Charlotte a particularly astute businesswoman in her unsavory line of work.
“Har,” another man chimed in. “Sloppy seconds for you, Larry.”
Plates rattled. “Here,” said Charlotte. “Eat your chicken while you’re waiting. You don’t want it cold. Although it’s good that way, too.”
“Indeed it is. Some days out on the rig, I don’t know what I look forward to more. Your dark meat or theirs.” General hilarity.
Lola turned to Tina. “So the fried chicken stand is a real thing?”
“They make money on the food and the girls, both. Nancy said that sometimes the guys don’t even bother to wipe off their hands after they eat. The girls end up covered in chicken grease.”
“Huh.” Lola roamed the room as they spoke. She picked up the lamp, put it down. It was plastic, with no more heft than a toy. She checked the bulb. Charlotte must have squirreled away the old incandescent variety, or maybe the new curly ones simply hadn’t made their way to Burnt Creek yet. Even if Lola shattered the bulb, the jagged edge of the eggshell glass would break at the first stab, allowing her to hurt someone only just enough to piss him off. She cast a glance over her shoulder through the just-open door, then pulled the folding chair beneath the window and stood on it. No matter how long, or from what angle, she studied the window, it was far too narrow to allow her, or even Tina, to squeeze through. The window gave a view of row upon row of trailers, with the endless prairie beyond. Despair gouged Lola’s heart. “A wasteland,” she’d called the prairie. Now its promise of space and freedom seemed wondrous. What if she never saw prairie again? Something flitted across the corner of her field of vision. She blinked hard. Sure enough, there was the motion again, a flash of black and white.
A dog. Nosing among the trailers. Listing on three legs.
Lola cranked at the window mechanism until it opened a crack, wet her lips, pursed them, and managed a quick whistle. Bub’s head whipped around, ears at attention. Lola whist
led again and he streaked toward the trailer. “Bub! Oh, Bub!” she gasped.
“What’s going on?” Tina got up from the bed.
Lola turned, heedless of the tears washing her cheeks. “My dog. He’s here! He can help us.”
Tina clambered onto the chair and squeezed beside her, clinging to the narrow window frame for balance. “How?”
On any other topic, Lola would have welcomed the sudden skepticism in her voice. The girl needed to toughen up, and fast. But this was about Bub. “We could write a note,” she said. “Throw it from the window.” Ignoring the foolish optimism in her own voice, the deeper foolishness of her words.
Tina showed no such inclination. “Did you see a pen anywhere in here? Paper?”
“Blood.”
“What?”
Somehow, Tina had gotten the upper hand. Lola wanted it back. She raised her left arm to her face, tore at the soft skin of her inner arm with her teeth. Blood welled from the ragged cut. Lola lowered her arm, licked her teeth free of the coppery taste. The blood trickled toward her hand. “We’ll write with this,” she said. “We can use a scrap of sheet, or a shirt; hell, even our underwear, and throw it to him.”
Tina’s lips twitched in an almost-smile. “He’s a dog. Throw him woman-smelling panties with blood on them and he’s just going to eat them. Besides, even if he didn’t, what’s he going to do? He’s not one of those TV dogs my gran’mother talks about, the ones who always came to somebody’s rescue.”
“Lassie,” Lola said. “Rin Tin Tin.”
“Whatever. Even if he were, who would he bring it to? Someone in the man camp? You think they’d help any of us? Mama’s is the best thing that ever happened to them.”
Lola knew Tina was right. “But,” she said. Bub was her last link to home, to safety. Without him, she and Tina were alone, lacking—despite her brave talk—a single way out. She couldn’t see the dog anymore. She called through the open window. “Bub! Bub!”
Tina gave a yelp. A hard hand clamped around Lola’s neck. Dawg lifted her bodily from the chair with one hand, Tina with the other. “What do we have here? Trying to get somebody’s attention?” He threw Tina onto the bed first, then Lola, and stuck his head out the door.
“Mama? Would you mind coming on down here for a second? We’ve got ourselves a situation.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
For the first time, Lola saw the other girls.
Charlotte waited until the last man in the trailer had finished his business, sending him on his way without so much as a cold drumstick, then slapped a “Closed” sign on the door. She gathered the girls on couches in what appeared to have been designed as a central rec room for the modular unit but must have served as a waiting room for the men, not to mention a place where she could serve up chicken platters. Three round white plastic tables and matching chairs sat in the center of the room; there were more seats still at the counter that served as a kitchen divider. Charlotte stationed Dawg with the girls, and waited in the kitchen with Tina and Lola after summoning Thor by cellphone.
“You need to get on over here. Dawg caught our new guests hollering out the window. And that’s not the half of it. Wait ’til you see what I found.” She waited in glowering silence. Lola sneaked peeks at the other girls. She wanted to throw a blanket over them. They wore cheap nylon negligees, lace gone grimy, nipples showing dark through the translucent stuff. In her jeans and heavy sweater, Lola felt overdressed. She forced her gaze to their schoolgirl faces, noted the telltale dullness in their eyes. She reminded herself that, at least according to what she’d heard, most of these girls were known users. Maybe three squares, a warm, dry place to sleep, and a regular supply of junk without any hassle from parents or police was all it took to enslave a teenage addict. Lola looked at Charlotte and hated her a little more, something that until that moment, she hadn’t thought possible. Charlotte smirked, dimples digging craters in her cheeks. Lola imagined that her unspoken dialogue with Charlotte consisted of a single word on each side: “Die.”
“I have to know something.” Lola kept her voice low so the girls wouldn’t hear their conversation. “How’d you get into this line of work? I thought you were a nurse.”
“You know what they pay nurses over in the clinic?”
“I do, actually.” Lola thought back to the budget document, the obvious discontent of the county clerk and the librarian. She’d been right about the tension over old salaries versus new money.
“I did keep on nursing a while. But then Thor took note of all these man camps and suggested the fried chicken stand. Turns out Thor had been sharing his lunches with Dawg, who told him he was a fool to give away chicken that good for free. Pretty soon, I could afford to quit nursing. I still work a spare shift once in awhile so I can get the drug samples. But mostly now I spend my days frying up chicken. Everyone tells me my chicken makes the colonel’s taste like dogshit.” Charlotte puffed up like a pigeon at the remembered compliment.
“I’m still not seeing my way from frying chicken to running girls.”
“Oh, that,” Charlotte said, as casually as though she were talking about selling crafts at a church fund-raiser. “Dawg was all the time telling me how he used to work for a guy who ran girls, back where they didn’t have half the market as the patch. He knew there was extra room in the trailer. And then there was this one guy Dawg met over at The Train and started bringing to the camp for his meals.” Dawg’s head turned at the sound of his name. “Somehow, he got wind of how Dawg was pushing us to do this.”
It was Dawg’s turn to go all prideful. He stepped to the counter at the sound of his name, keeping an eye on the girls. “I used to see him down at The Train, mooning over an Indian girl who worked there. She wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. But he got me to thinking about how many mens like their meat dark.”
“Let me guess,” said Lola. “Fat little guy. Glasses. Sweaty.”
“The very one,” said Charlotte. “Smart, too. He said he could get girls. And he did. Not just any girls. Indian girls. Young, or at least young-looking. Seems the patch attracts a particular brand of pervert. Anyhow, you need to specialize, have a niche. That’s where the money lies.”
Spoken like a true entrepreneur, Lola thought. She wondered what it was about Charlotte that had made Dawg comfortable with floating the idea—to the wife of an officer of the law, no less—of running girls. Maybe it was a gut thing. The same way Charlie had said he could sniff out liars, maybe Dawg could detect folks willing to bend the rules, had divined the greedy, grasping thing within Charlotte that Thor foolishly left unfulfilled.
“We had the location, right in the man camp,” Charlotte said. “We had the cover—the chicken stand. And we had the space. I’d been thinking to knock out the walls between the bedrooms, turn this place into a real restaurant instead of a takeout stand. But it turns out they’re way more profitable as bedrooms.”
Lola let her babble on. Her mind returned to something Dawg had said. “What happened to that girl you saw dancing at The Train? The one the little guy liked?”
Neither Dawg nor Charlotte answered for a moment. “She was the first one came worked for us,” Dawg said finally.
Lola looked into the waiting room at Maylinn-Carole-Annie-Nancy. “Which one is she?”
Dawg opened his mouth to reply. “She quit,” Charlotte said.
Judith, Lola thought.
There was one thing Lola still couldn’t understand. “How’d you get Thor to go along?”
Those ghastly dimples again. “We started small, just the one girl. I told Thor she was a runaway I’d met at the clinic who needed a safe place to crash.” Lola wondered how they’d lured Judith to the trailer. Tried to imagine at what point Judith had realized it was best to pretend to go along, to submit with an eye to eventual escape. Jan had called Judith’s brand a running heart. Grotesque as the brand was, it had epitomized Judith in the end. That big heart of hers had run straight home to her people. Despite everything, s
he’d hung on to that eagle feather, and she’d died free.
Charlotte nattered on. “By the time Thor realized what was going on, she’d been turning tricks for weeks. Then it was just a matter of pointing out a couple of facts to him.”
“Those being?”
“The only way for him to stop it would be to arrest his own wife.”
Implicating himself in the process, Lola thought. Charlotte didn’t even have to point out the unlikelihood of Thor convincing anyone he hadn’t known about the operation from the start. “You said there were two things,” Lola asked. “What’s the other one?”
Charlotte dipped a hand into her apron pocket and came out with her fingers wrapped around a wad of cash. “This.”
Lola saw lots of bills with multiple zeroes. Before she could estimate the considerable amount, a knock sounded at the door. Charlotte tucked the money away.
“It’s me,” Thor called. Dawg lifted a curtain and nodded to Charlotte. She hustled Lola and Tina to the couches with the other girls as the door opened. The room had been warm and, just like that, it was cold. Lola noticed that none of the underdressed girls so much as flinched. Whatever Charlotte was giving them was powerful stuff.
“What’s going on? Why are we closed? Do you know how much money we lose every hour we’re shut down?” Thor shed his coat, his cap, and his clown-size puffy gloves as he spoke. His face was red with cold. His nose dripped. He pulled a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew. He was not, Lola decided, nearly as handsome as she’d thought when she’d first met him.
“You’ve only yourself to blame.” Charlotte’s voice dripped acid.
Thor walked to the counter that divided the room from the kitchen, studied a platter heaped with pieces of chicken and chose a thigh. He settled himself at one of the tables in the lounge and tore at it with his teeth. A long strip of skin pulled away with it and hung from his mouth. He sucked it in. “How do you figure?”
