by Dana Marton
“I’m Victoria.” The blonde flashed an expectant smile, as if she’d just given him a gift and was waiting for his thanks.
She wiggled closer, in the how-do-you-like-my-tits dance.
“I bet my girlfriends that I could get you to buy me a drink,” she said in a rich-girl whiny voice that probably got her boyfriend to buy her the expensive-looking shoes and matching purse that came from an alligator who, frankly, should have fought harder.
When Ian stayed silent, she said, “So do you work in construction or something?”
He couldn’t blame her for that. They were in a blue-collar neighborhood. And he clearly didn’t look like a stockbroker. “Used to be military.”
She perked up. “Navy SEAL?”
“Army.”
She only flagged a little. “Still, you probably killed like a ton of people, right?”
He kept his voice flat as he said, “Not at Shanahan’s.”
She had no response to that. After a few awkward seconds, she slinked back to her friends, and they ordered more drinks, watching him and whispering.
Ian’s bottle went down to the last quarter.
“She’ll be back,” Dean Shanahan predicted from behind the bar, then gave him a mock once-over. “Thirty, six feet even, two hundred pounds of mostly muscle. Face it, boyo, you look like a good lay.”
Ian stared into his drink. “Wish she’d realize I’m a hell of a bad bet.”
Even as Dean moved on with a nod, the woman was prancing over again.
In the same you-should-be-grateful tone she’d used before, she said, “Hey, so, wanna go out back?”
And Ian was in a dark enough mood to nod, still without fully looking at her. “Yeah. Sure.”
He knocked back his drink and gestured to Dean behind the bar not to put away the bottle.
He slid off his barstool and checked out the woman more thoroughly at last: overdressed for these parts in a black skirt and red silk blouse, flawless makeup, slick hair, fancy Christmas-themed manicure with snowflakes. She probably spent more on maintenance than Ian did on his apartment.
He led the way to the back door. He’d been to the alley before. For a quick retch, a quick fight, a quick fuck. The alley didn’t encourage lingering. At least now, with the cold, the stench was a little more bearable than in summer.
As soon as the metal door banged closed behind them, she moved in for a kiss.
He put a hand on her head and pushed her down, her hair sticky with some spray stuff, and she glanced up as if ready to protest.
He paused. Waited her out. If she balked, they were done. He was happy either way.
But as soon as he took his hand off her hair, she undid his belt and tugged down his zipper, then she latched on to him with a suction that could give Dyson a run for their money.
He liked a little more technique, but she did the trick. Soon he was close, but one of her back teeth had a sharp edge on the inside, and it kept rubbing against him.
He pulled her up by her shoulders.
She licked her lips with a haughty little snicker. “I bet you didn’t get that in the army.”
He wasn’t here to talk. He pushed her against the wall and yanked her skirt up. Except the damn skirt was too tight, so he grabbed harder and ripped the stupid thing.
“Hey! Do you have any idea how much that cost?”
But by that time, he had a rubber on his dick, and he shoved into her.
He gave it to her rough, didn’t care if the bricks scraped her ass. Coming into a bar like this, walking up to a guy like him, she’d been looking for rough. Rough and dangerous, something to give the sex an edge.
She proved him right when she moaned, her eyes rolling back in her head. “Oh. Oh yes.”
He banged her harder to keep her quiet.
Christ. She squealed loud enough to be heard on Mars.
Fuck that. He let it go. Came.
She didn’t.
When he pulled out, she turned eagerly to face the wall, bent forward and braced herself with her hands, pushed out her ass. She thought they were just switching positions.
What she thought was her problem.
Ian tossed the rubber into the open Dumpster, belted his pants, then walked away.
“Hey,” she called after him. “What the hell? Hey!”
He kept on walking and didn’t look back.
The night was cold, but he didn’t mind. He’d seen colder in the Afghan mountains.
He stepped back into the bar through the front, grabbed his bottle, and left enough money to cover it, plus tip.
“See you tomorrow, boyo,” Dean said without a note of judgment.
Dean Shanahan was an Irishman who didn’t drink, didn’t play the ponies, and didn’t fight. No joke, a bleedin’ Buddhist. If Shanahan’s patrons could overlook him turning into the Dalai Lama, he stood prepared to overlook just about anything from them. Which was why Ian liked the place.
He grunted his good-bye, then booked the hell out of there.
He walked the six blocks to his apartment building, saw Sharon on the street again—bony and jumpy-eyed.
He looked at her. She looked at him.
He’d known her long enough not to need conversation. Her new man had left her, the kids needed to eat.
Ian dug into his pocket and passed her what money he had. He didn’t tell her to take the night off and go home to the kids—she’d do that anyway. And she didn’t offer to earn the money from him—he would turn her down as he had every time in the past.
To any onlooker, the exchange would have looked strange—a man passing by a prostitute, giving her money, then the two of them walking off in opposite directions.
Ian went inside, climbed up to his studio apartment on the top floor of the four-story walk-up. He dropped onto his couch that’d been old back when that meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. He drank straight from the bottle and didn’t bother turning on the TV.
From the corner of his eye, he caught the light blinking on the answering machine on the side table. He swung the bottle in the general direction of the Play button.
“Hey, it’s Finch,” a familiar voice shouted over traffic noise in the background. “I’m in Rio. I’m in trouble, man. Gonna clear out for a while. When things settle down, I wanna come up and see you.”
Ian took another swig. He and Finch had saved each other’s lives a couple of times in the army. Finch was as close to a younger brother as Ian had. Impulsive as hell, but heart in the right place. Most of the time. What kind of trouble has the idiot gotten into now?
As if anticipating that question, Finch said, “Can’t tell you more on the phone. But just don’t take off. I had a helluva time tracking you down. I’ll be there in a month or two. I’ll bring a present. I have a sweet little package for you. And don’t you worry about me. I got my lucky belt.” He laughed.
As the message ended, Ian glanced at the machine. The displayed showed: UNKNOWN NUMBER.
Dumb and Dumber all in one. If Finch told him where the hell he was going or who he was running from, Ian could go down and help him. He hadn’t even known that Finch was in South America. Last they’d talked, the idiot had been in Seattle.
He’d probably gone down for some job or other—a shady one, judging by the message. Still, he was a tough kid. He should be able to handle it. And if not, maybe he’d learn from the experience.
Ian finished the bottle, then lay back on the couch, hoping he’d drunk enough for oblivion. Not much scared him, but sleep… Just the thought of dreaming burned his stomach with acid.
He always dreamed the same thing: Linda in the car with the twins, Connor and Colin screaming for him as they were drowning. Drowning because their father was half a world away.
He’d been in Afghanistan when the van had gone into the Potomac. The neighborhood cops had ruled it an accident.
Was it?
Or had they been trying to spare him? Because they knew him, because he was a decorated war hero. They didn’t
want to add to his grief.
Just two weeks before, when he’d been home on leave, Linda had begged him not to go back. She had postpartum depression, her mother said when Ian had called her to see if she could come and stay with Linda and the kids for a while.
Maureen had come.
But Linda still…
Ian shoved himself upright with a curse.
Hell, fuck. Now that he’d started thinking about all that, he’d never fall asleep. He shuffled out to the kitchen and searched through the cupboards for another bottle, and tried hard not to think how his wife and baby sons had ended up in the river.
According to the police report he’d managed to sneak a peek at, there had been no skid marks on the road, no sign that Linda had used the brakes.
Chapter Two
Daniela
For one moment, Daniela was free.
Then caught, beaten, and dragged back.
“A girl who runs away makes me look like I can’t handle my own house,” Senhora Rosa said. “So the next time you run away, I’m going to feed you to the piranhas in the cove.”
The big red house down the river where Pedro had taken Daniela had a floor of boards instead of bamboo, glass windows, and a bathroom. The electricity came from wires, not from generators. About twenty girls like Daniela lived here, at least half of them peeking around doorways at the moment to watch the new girl’s fate.
Daniela hung her head, her heart frantically flopping inside her chest like a river dolphin stranded in mud.
Piranhas didn’t like the fast currents of the river, but at the cove at the edge of town where the water stood nearly still, piranhas hunted. Daniela had heard gruesome tales from the men who visited Senhora Rosa’s establishment.
“Do you understand me, garota?” Senhora Rosa snapped.
“Sim, senhora,” Daniela mumbled.
“Then off you go, and thank these nice policemen for bringing you back.”
Daniela led the two men to her room, her back and arms aching from the beating they’d given her.
The aches wouldn’t hurt long, not beyond a day or two. Senhora Rosa beat her too. And sometimes so did the paying customers.
Not all of them. A lot of men liked her, but, because of that, the other girls didn’t. Which, at the moment, was the least of Daniela’s worries.
The snake-eyed policeman shed his rumpled clothes in seconds, but the fat one huffed and puffed and struggled with his belt. He caught Daniela looking. “Too old for this, aren’t you?”
She thought he meant Rosa’s house, since the other girls were even younger.
But he said, “Too old for still not knowing your place. Are you wrong in the head? You better learn quick, girl.”
He yanked off his belt at last.
Her blood rushed loudly wroom, wroom, wroom in her ears, like the distant sound of chain saws in the forest, the sound of loggers.
“Look lively, girl. Nobody likes a sulking whore.”
She plastered a smile on her face.
At the beginning, she had cried and wished she could return to her village, but Pedro never came back to see what had become of her. So Daniela stopped crying. She stopped missing her mother. She stopped missing the village. She stopped feeling altogether.
She no longer thought about going far away to become a teacher. She understood that dream had been washed away forever. The dark water had carried her dead hopes down the river like it’d carried her mother’s log coffin.
The fat policeman pushed down his pants.
She thought about how long it might take for the piranhas to kill her, and how much it might hurt. She must never give Rosa a reason to take her to the cove.
The snake-eyed policeman closed the door with a thud, a tree falling in the forest.
And in Daniela’s head, her grandmother softly whispered, We endure.
* * *
Carmen
Through the hazy morning, Carmen Barbosa looked across the Içana River at the red house that hung out over the water, raised on stilts, a flat blob like a well-fed caiman—the Amazon’s version of an alligator. She tapped her foot. Chewed her lip. She could see people move behind the lit windows at night, but she couldn’t see enough of what went on inside.
She was waiting for the girls to come out for a swim as they usually did, but time seemed to stretch endlessly like the rain forest itself. The humidity was already oppressively thick in the air, pushing down on her, making her tired.
Even as she watched—eyes forward, attention focused—every cell of her body was aware of the man behind her in the small kitchen.
Tap, tap, tap. Phil Heyerdahl was typing away on his laptop at the table.
She glanced back. “Sounds like it’s going well.”
Phil looked up from his laptop, rolled his neck, his shoulder muscles shifting under his tanned skin. His short blond hair stood up in spikes from running his fingers through it as he worked. He looked hot and handsome in a geeky kind of way.
He was writing a book on the soldados da borracha, rubber soldiers.
During the World War II rubber boom, the Brazilian government had forced tens of thousands of people to the region to harvest white gold, aka rubber. They were promised they’d be treated as war heroes, returned home after the war, and given housing. But the government reneged. The jungle killed most of the rubber workers. Some of the survivors made new lives for themselves in nearby towns and villages. Only six thousand found their way home at the end.
“Did you know the US government paid a hundred bucks for every worker the Brazilian government dragged here to supply latex to US factories?” Phil went back to typing. “We needed rubber for the war.”
Carmen and Phil were both twenty-three, one year out of college—Carmen from Penn State, daughter of Brazilian immigrants, Phil from Stanford, son of two professors. They’d met in Africa the year before, working for a charity that installed wells in remote villages.
They’d both planned on doing a year of volunteer work between college and entering the workforce in the US. But by the end of the year, they were in love—with each other and with volunteer work. So here they were, in Brazil, in the Amazon rain forest, hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, helping to build a clinic while Phil wrote his book on the side, inspired by a nearly hundred-year-old local priest who’d ministered to the soldados da borracha back in the day. Father Angelo had personally administered last rites to well over a thousand, and he had a little notebook with the names of his dead carefully recorded.
Phil was obsessed with the story. He was happy here. They both were. Although, they would be happy anywhere as long as they were together.
Carmen looked back across the black river, at the girls who spilled through the back door at last and jumped from the deck into the river, a short six-foot drop. Splash. Splash. Splash. A bamboo ladder tied to the deck would help them climb back.
Rain dripped from the sky, stopped, then dripped again, as if the weather couldn’t make up its mind. At least they were in the dry season. In the rainy season, a good downpour could last for days, and the river would rise, probably all the way to the red house’s deck. The girls wouldn’t need the ladder then.
Carmen rubbed her aching arm. “I want to do something to help those girls.”
“It’s a private school for orphans.”
He’d actually gone over one morning the week before, knocked on the door, and inquired—to set Carmen’s mind at ease. An older woman had responded and told him that she ran the school, explained what they were.
“What else was she going to say?” Carmen tapped her foot again, watching the girls splash in the water. “You were wearing your clinic volunteer shirt. She was probably afraid that you were the kind of foreign do-gooder who would try to interfere.”
Sometimes she worried about Phil. He was more of a geek than a warrior. A writer at heart. Was he strong enough for this kind of work?
She watched the girls swim.
Once again
, they were rough on the skinniest one, who was also the prettiest, tall compared to the others. She was the newcomer and had the saddest eyes. For some reason, Carmen kept seeing herself in the girl. Maybe because Carmen had been as skinny at that age. From chemo and radiation.
“It can’t be a brothel,” Phil said. “The girls are way too young. You haven’t seen them close-up. I have.”
Carmen had seen them. Every time she had to go across the river for something, she made a point to walk by the place. The property was fenced in the front, but she could see through the gaps in the bamboo fence.
She loved Phil’s gentle heart for thinking the girls were too young, but she knew there were men with darker hearts who wouldn’t think so, not for a minute.
She chewed her bottom lip. “How about the men who visit?”
“Mrs. Rosa said they were the school’s patrons, local businessmen.” Some doubt crept into Phil’s voice at last. But then he said, “I’ve seen the police over there. If something bad was going on in that house, they would have dealt with it.”
Carmen could only shake her head. “The police are customers, like the others.”
When she’d met Phil in Africa, they’d both been naïve and innocent in the ways of the world. What she’d seen there had changed that.
Africa was a vast continent, with amazingly prosperous countries like Botswana, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, and others, cities as modern as London and Paris, but aid workers went to areas that hadn’t caught up yet. The parts Carmen had seen were where young girls were walking miles to school and being raped on the way, but took the risk and went anyway, because they wanted to learn so badly.
She’d seen girls in puberty dying of infections from female circumcision. Preteens being married off, then dying in labor because their bodies weren’t developed enough yet for pregnancy, and because there was no doctor for many miles.
Carmen had lost her innocence in Africa. She’d spent most of her time in homes, talking to women, helping them, while Phil had been with the well equipment, surrounded by men, explaining how things worked, and how to take care of everything once the volunteers left. Phil hadn’t seen as much real life as she had.
