Honey knelt on the seat, leaned over, and ran a hand over his crotch, squeezing gently, trying to work him up so she could get back on the track under the relative safety of the streetlight. He grabbed her wrist and set her hand back in her own lap. “I said I want to talk.”
“About what? You too cheap for therapy?”
“About this guy.” He pulled a photograph from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. She reached for the overhead light switch. He deflected her hand, pulling a small penlight from his pocket and shining it on the picture. “You seen him?” he asked.
“No. I don’t know. All y’all look alike to me.”
“Where are you from that ‘all y’all’ is something people say?”
“I’m from up that block,” she said, pointing out the window.
The man sighed heavily and said, “Fair enough. Take another look at the guy. Study his face real hard. You recognize him or not?” He shone the light on the glossy paper, trying to get an angle that didn’t obscure the image with glare. It was a grainy black and white, but taken from a close angle. The man in the picture had a goatee, oddly shaped sport sunglasses, and wore a baseball cap. His mouth was open, but it wasn’t to say anything. It just looked like he breathed with his lips parted.
The creep in the photo was as familiar as anyone else she’d ever seen—white guy with a chin beard and a Red Sox cap. Almost every single john who rolled down her block looked like him. She said so.
“This one is special,” the cop said.
“Nobody’s special.”
“He is. Believe me. You see this guy, you call me.” He handed her a business card. A gold shield like the one he’d flashed at her was embossed on the card next to the logo for the Boston Police Department. Beside the shield it read,
LIEUTENANT DETECTIVE
WILLIAM P. DIXON
HOMICIDE UNIT
The precinct address was listed on the bottom left opposite his office number, fax, and direct dial. “What’s the P stand for?” she asked.
“Pepper.”
She laughed. He didn’t even grin.
“What’s your name?”
“Honey.”
“What’s the name your parents gave you?”
She blinked a few times. He hadn’t asked for her “real” name—“the name your parents gave you.” Honey was as real as a name got for her any more. “I was . . . my name is Mindy.”
“Well, Mindy, you keep that picture. You see this prick, call the number on the back of my card.” She turned the small white square over. He’d written a cell phone number on the reverse side in blue ink. “Give me a description of his car and the plate, but do not get in. You listening?”
“I hear you,” she said, playing with a strand of her hair.
“Help yourself, Honey. I’ve got only so many eyes I can put on the stroll.”
“You mean you don’t want to spare none for the track.”
“I’m out here, aren’t I?”
She chewed on the end of her hair for a moment before asking, “Where am I supposed to keep all of this shit?” She indicated her outfit. No pockets; barely any fabric. She spread her legs slightly, giving him another look, wanting to see his expression change again. It didn’t. He shook his head.
“Keep it out. Show the picture around. Let everyone know, any working girl who gets in this freak’s car is turning a death trick. You hear me?”
Her breath caught. He’d said he was homicide, but all she’d cared about when she got in was that he wasn’t vice. He asked again if she was listening. She nodded and stared a little harder at the image. “He’s killing working girls?” she said when she was able to find her breath.
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes he lets them go?”
“Sometimes he murders citizens too. But he mostly sticks to ‘low-profile targets.’ Do you know what I mean when I say that?”
“No one cares if he does one of us.”
The cop didn’t say anything.
“Why me?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Why did you pick me? You should be talking to Comfort’s bottom girl. She’s the one who runs the track. She can get the word out.” Honey waited for him to tell her that he endangered her by jumping the chain of command because she looked smarter than the other girls. Friendlier and more likely to understand. She listened for the lines Comfort used when he explained why she was destined to out-earn all his other bitches except Chai.
He let out a long breath and said, “Because you look like the girls we find behind the dumpsters.”
She sat staring at him for a long minute. He cracked his window and lit a cigarette, letting her have all the time she needed to picture herself lying lifeless behind a stinking trash bin, bled out and stiff. Dixon offered her a smoke. She shook her head, refusing.
“You’re organic Honey, huh?” he said replacing the pack on his dash. “You keep that self-preservation instinct. Use it out there.” He took one more deep drag. “You need me to drop you?”
“You don’t know nothin’ about The Game, do you? You gonna get me hurt worse than a bad date.” His forehead wrinkled as if he didn’t understand. “A bad date,” she repeated, as if it was self-evident she meant a violent john. When he didn’t seem to be getting it, she said, “Nobody ever drives me home. Especially not no cops. I ain’t s’posed to talk to you.”
“Then you better get going.” He pushed the button on the door handle unlocking the car, but not moving to open her door. Electric chivalry.
She held out a hand. “Forty.”
“A blow job on this block is twenty,” he said.
“Now you think you know something, huh? You kept me longer than it’d take to blow.”
“I have stamina.”
“Not with me. No one has that much stamina.”
He handed her sixty dollars and said, “Buy something to eat.”
Honey snatched the money and let herself out of the car, trotted for the end of the alley. She hesitated at the sidewalk, glancing over her shoulder. The detective’s car remained where he’d parked. She turned the corner and listened for a moment, waiting for the sound of him driving away. If he left, she didn’t hear.
She stared at the man in the picture, memorizing what she could see of his face. Dixon didn’t know anything about how she worked and survived. Taking the picture around the block was more likely to get her marked as a snitch than it was to be taken seriously. Still, she figured he might know a thing or two about the kind of people who got off on killing girls like her. She decided to take his word for it that he was looking out for her. Comfort would understand that she was looking out for him by warning them.
She was his golden girl.
Comfort’s fists left Honey with an ache in her guts that reached up her spine and down into her bowels. She lay on the sidewalk, crumpled up like the detective’s photograph. Chai spit on the picture before kicking her in the crotch with the wedge toe of her platform shoe. Honey’s back arched and her cry echoed against the monolithic brick factory wall opposite the park. Comfort gave her another punt in the guts with his Timberland, silencing her. “You a snitch? You a snitch?” his bottom bitch yelled as she tore up the detective’s business card. She threw the pieces in Honey’s face.
She wanted to tell them she wasn’t. She wanted to say that she was looking out for Comfort’s girls by showing them the picture, but she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs to give volume to her words. She whispered “I’m sorry,” in between shallow breaths.
“Goddamn right you sorry. Gonna be more sorry if you don’t get correct. You don’t talk to five-oh. You don’t open that mouth except to suck a dick. You feel me?”
“Ye—” Chai kicked her in the stomach as she tried to agree. She nodded.
Comfort said, “You learnin’. You got an hour to get back on the block, or else I’m callin’ up a party. Get some motherfuckers to jump on the train.” He stomped off, leavin
g Chai to finish explaining what was expected of her.
She squatted in front of Honey and flicked the crumpled picture at Honey’s face with a dragonlady fingernail. “If you see this iceman, you come to me. I’ll get Comfort and he’ll take care of it. You don’t go to the police for shit, you hear?”
Honey nodded. Chai stood up and brushed the hair out of her face, preening for her return to her man’s side. He wouldn’t tolerate her looking disheveled. She was not his most expensive piece of jewelry, but she was the prettiest. “You got forty-five minutes to get up and earn.” She sashayed away, making sure that the other girls on the block saw she was queen.
Rolling over, Honey sobbed and held her stomach. It hurt so bad she worried she might be bleeding internally—that the two of them might have ruptured something. But she couldn’t go to the hospital. She couldn’t go anywhere except maybe around the corner to the “pharmacy.” L’il Bentley would have something to get her through the night. She’d give him the twenty she’d stuffed in her shoe for an Oxy. It might not get her through the night, but it’d get her back on the track and in the game. She pushed up onto her hands and knees, waited until the cramping and nausea subsided enough to stand on her feet, and staggered off to find the dealer, leaving the picture where it lay. If Comfort or Chai found it on her, there would be no amount of Oxy that could dull what they’d do to her.
It was days before she could stand fully upright without cramping. Days during which it was a welcome moment to lean over and rest her elbows on the doorframe of a john’s car and ask, “Wanna date?” Still, she did it. Pushed through the pain until she’d skimmed enough to afford a pill or two.
She wasn’t earning as well as she had been before the beating. But Comfort didn’t say anything to her about the money or how she looked. While he was always reciting mystical-sounding shit to the people hanging around him, he didn’t say anything to her at all anymore. One of his street soldiers asked why she was looking so used up and he thumped the book he always carried around, The Art of War, like some street corner preacher about to drop the word of Almighty God on an acolyte hungry to be fed the gospel of original pimping. “Once upon a time in China, the Emperor asked General Tso to make all his hos into an army,” he said, holding court. “So the general, he lined all those bitches up and put the Emperor’s favorite in charge. He tell them, ‘turn left,’ and when they didn’t do shit like he said, he beheaded the bitch in charge. What do you think those hos did when he promoted the next one to bottom bitch and said ‘turn left’? I tell you, they turned the fuck left.” He laughed and nodded his head toward Honey. “She was an up-make-you-comer. Look at her now. That’s what happens to snitches and bitches who don’t do what they told.” His golden girl was now his object lesson on how to keep the troops in line. And when she looked at him hungrily, she was left to starve.
Chai, in turn, was leaving Honey with less of her own money at the end of the night, claiming that it wasn’t Comfort who was going to suffer if she wasn’t working hard enough. Honey was doing the best she could, but as much as it hurt to stand up and even breathe, it hurt worse to fuck. And her increasingly despairing look was driving away the johns. If it wasn’t the sleeplessness caused by the pain, it was surely the physical effects of the painkillers. The Oxy had left her looking pallid, with dark gray bags under her eyes. She tried to compensate with make-up, but she ended up looking . . . “trashy,” her mother would have said. She was beginning to look like a junkie. Like a whore.
The man behind the wheel of the car looked her over as she asked him for a date, his face turning down with disappointment and contempt. Without a word he goosed the gas and the Mustang lurched off. The edge of the window frame banged Honey in the temple and she went sprawling to the ground, long skinny legs kicking out instinctively, shoving herself out of the way of the car’s rear wheels before they crushed her legs. Before another man left her alone to suffer.
She picked herself up and staggered to the street. She didn’t bother to pull down the tight jersey skirt bunched up over her hips. Another girl on the block laughed as Honey held her stinging face and sobbed. A long purple bruise was going to make her even less attractive. She could already feel the side of her face growing hot, swelling. Although, she didn’t see how that could make business worse.
Another car slid up the block and stopped a few yards away. The girl who’d laughed wiggled her ample hips as she tottered on too-high heels toward the open window. Honey watched as she curved her spine to the side so the john could see both her cleavage and the curve of her bare hip while she set up the deal. She stared, watching the woman twitch her hips, listening to the crack of her cackle as she amused herself with her wit. But she wasn’t opening the door. In a moment, if the john didn’t agree to the terms she offered, she’d shift from flirty to furious. Screaming “faggot” while kicking backward at his car with her heels like a donkey, trying to dent the door or at least scratch the paint so he’d have something to explain when he got home to the missus. Punish him for not helping her make her ends.
Honey glanced at the john. Her heart beat hard in her chest and she lost her breath. He looked like all the others. Goatee, Oakley Half Jackets, and baseball cap with a big white B shading his face. His mouth hung open, but not in a way that suggested idiocy. He looked hungry, like someone had just set out supper. He wanted to taste. He was a wolf who wanted to gobble the girl up and take her inside himself where she would be his forever, like in a fairy tale.
Honey thought about her huntsman, Detective Dixon. He told her to call him and he’d come running. He’d barge into the cottage and slay the wolf and rescue the girl.
She thought about Comfort and Chai. The bottom bitch had said to call her and Comfort would descend on the wolf like angry villagers protecting their lambs.
The man nodded and moved his head, indicating the girl should get in. What was her name? Something like Crystal or Quartz . . . or Ruby! That was it. Ruby—pulled open the door to climb inside.
Honey shouted, “Wait!” Tottering toward the car in the heels that she used to be good at walking in, but had become uncertain in as her back had been made weak and crooked, she called out for the man to stop. “How about a double date?” she shouted.
Ruby stuck her hand out the open window and stuck up her middle finger as they drove away. The car slipped off into the darkness, pulling around into the alley. She ran after it. Huffing and out of breath, she rounded the corner in time to see the silhouette of the man pull his hands away from Ruby’s face and lay her limp form gently against the seatback. The red taillights of the car flashed as he stepped on the brake before putting it in gear and then they dimmed and he drove away.
“Wait!” she screamed, knowing he couldn’t hear over the sound of the engine, Honey calling out after, “Not her! Me! Take ME! I’m the one you want!”
She memorized the license plate and make and model of the car. She tried to file everything away in her mind, making sure every detail was there to be recalled, despite the fog of her dulled Oxy brain.
The next time he rolled up the stroll, she would know it was him before she even saw his face. She’d see the car and she would be at his window, smiling and showing him that she was everything he’d ever wanted: the girl next door, the babysitter, his daughter, anyone as long as he let her in the car and took her away. He could do anything he wanted to her, as long as he took her away for good.
Except, of course, she knew he wouldn’t come again. He’d move on to another track in another part of the city. He’d hunted this ground. He’d go looking for a new girl who was fresh and everything he desired. Not her. Not anymore.
She fell to her knees. The concrete dug into her shins and scuffed her skin and added another set of blemishes that tarnished her looks so no one would ever want her again.
Not even a killer.
THIS LAST LITTLE PIECE OF DARKNESS
Ms. Cassandra Blaine
1982 Grantham St.
Stamfo
rd, CT 06513
3 April 2017
Dear Ms. Blaine,
I write to express my sympathies for you on your father’s sudden passing. I saw news of the accident on television and read in the paper of his upcoming memorial service. You don’t know me, but I know too well what it’s like to lose a parent, and I hope what I have to share below might help put the pain of your loss in a context. I am not sure exactly how to begin, but I do know when: 1979. That was the year that broke my mother. And I suppose that’s as good a place to start as any.
My mother was twenty-nine that year, and worked during the day as a receptionist in the front office of an auto repair garage. She was a single mother and I was a considerably self-sufficient eight-year-old “latchkey kid.” From reading your father’s obituary, I understand you’re only slightly younger than me, so I’m sure you remember that phrase, even if you were lucky enough not to have to be as independent as I was at that age.
We usually only saw each other in the early morning, and at dinner before she would head out to the bar. I would jump out of bed as soon as I heard water in the bathtub start to flow. She took long showers, and I took that time to have breakfast ready for her when she emerged from the bathroom in her terrycloth robe, a towel wrapped around her head in a damp turban. I’d pour a bowl of dry cereal for myself and set it on the table next to a sweating carton of milk, then stage a slice of bread in the toaster before carefully cutting a grapefruit and separating the slices from the rind and each other, the way she liked. If it doesn’t sound like much of a breakfast, it was the seventies, mind you, and there was “no such thing as too thin.” In any event, when the creak of the pipes in the bathroom signaled she was done, I’d push down the lever on the toaster. Mom liked her toast golden—not too done, but crunchy. I buttered her toast to my own taste, which meant too much margarine. She didn’t complain, but she didn’t always finish if it was too sodden by the time she sat down. For the same reasons, I never poured my milk until she came in to eat. I could have finished it while she was showering, but that would mean less of a reason for her to sit with me while I ate and she had the first cigarette of the day. I could barely taste my Cheerios through the smell of her Virginia Slims, but it didn’t matter. Breakfast was a ritual, and while it wasn’t much, I felt a sense of pride at having made it for the two of us. I’d make small talk, telling her how Scotty Goudsward up the block had gotten in trouble for using his lunch money to buy comic books, and now we couldn’t play, or how Jamie Levine had tickets to the circus because she loved horses, but the elephants scared her. She’d rest her head in a hand and reluctantly eat slices of grapefruit in between drags and listen.
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