The Dawn Patrol

by Don Winslow

  A year or so later, she found her way to Silver Dan’s.

  A couple of weeks after that, Dan Silver found his way to her.

  Of course he did.

  The owner of a strip club—in this case, a chain of strip clubs—has a sort of droit du seigneur when it comes to the girls. They don’t have to date him, and if they do date him, they don’t have to sleep with him, but it’s a good professional move if they do.

  You sleep with the boss, you don’t have to blow the night manager to get a good shift. The bartenders pour your drinks without coming on to you or wanting a cut. The other girls find space for you in front of the mirror. The really creepy customers pick up on the vibe and keep their distance.

  Tammy had been around long enough to know that, and even if she hadn’t, Angela would have told her. Angela was her best friend at Silver Dan’s. They hit it off right away—similar background, similar outlook, same tough attitude. It was Angela who told her that if the boss came calling, she’d better open the gates, or life could get impossible for her at the club.

  So she dated Dan.

  Yeah, but it was more than that, wasn’t it, if she really wants to look at the truth of herself. Dan wasn’t just a convenient lay or a good dinner—like most pimps, he was a daddy. He was that fucking father figure she’d been missing. Cliché, cliché, stereotype, and cliché but there it was. He treated her like a daughter and a fuck, incest sans the DNA and felony concerns, made her obey him and wear the clothes he picked out, made her call him “Daddy” as he did her from behind and pulled her hair like you’d jerk on the reins of a recalcitrant filly. She hated it and she loved it.

  She started sleeping with Mick Penner as rebellion. He was the opposite of a daddy—a boy-child lady-killer who fucked up and fell in love with her. She’d still come when Dan beckoned—and God knows how many other women he was doing on the side—but she’d go bang Mick and play house with him, and Mick treated her gently and with consideration, and she couldn’t get too much of that.

  She was with Danny the night of the fire. He told her to wait in the car, but she got bored and impatient. She stood outside and smoked a cigarette, but when that was done, she thought, Fuck Danny, and went inside.

  What she saw changed her world.

  Dirty mattresses on a concrete floor, an old showerhead surrounded by a torn plastic curtain strung on a clothesline, an open toilet in the corner. Random blankets, no sheets, some stained pillows without covers.

  The girls were like zombies.

  Later, Tammy would learn that these behaviors were symptomatic of severe and repetitive trauma, but that night Tammy just saw a group of young girls looking at her with dead eyes.

  Except one.

  One little girl came over, threw her arms around Tammy’s legs, pressed her head against her thighs, and held on tight.

  That was, of course, Luce.

  Tammy didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know how to handle this girl, didn’t know who these children were. She guessed at their ages—the oldest seemed to be a young teenager; the youngest couldn’t have been more than eight. The girl clutching her legs was probably eleven or twelve. All the girls had brown skin, black hair, dark eyes. They wore cheap clothes that looked like they’d come from the Salvation Army or an AM VETS store. Most were holding some vestiges of childhood or family—a stuffed dog, a plastic flower, a book.

  Luce wore a silver chain with a small cross.

  Tammy stroked the girl’s hair. It was greasy and dirty, but Tammy didn’t mind. She stroked the girl’s hair and made soft cooing sounds.

  Dan didn’t.

  Dan blew fucking up.

  He came down the hallway, saw Tammy in the room, and yelled, “What the fuck are you doing in here? I told you to wait outside!”

  Most of the girls threw themselves facedown on their mattresses and did their best to cover their heads with blankets. Luce held tighter to Tammy and pressed her face harder against her legs.

  Tammy didn’t back down.

  “What the fuck am I doing here!” she yelled back. “What the fuck is this, Dan?”

  Dan grabbed her by the arm and started to haul her out, Luce still clinging to Tammy’s legs. Dan stopped and grabbed the girl, trying to peel her off, but Tammy shoved and hit out at him and Dan had to let go of Luce to grab Tammy by the wrists.

  “You leave her alone!” Tammy yelled. “Or I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” Danny asked. “You’ll fucking what?”

  She brought a knee up into Danny’s balls.

  That was fucking what.

  Dan keeled over.

  Luce regained her grip on Tammy. One of Dan’s bouncers came out of a back room, hoisted Tammy away from the crying girl, hauled her out of the building, and forced her into Dan’s car. As he was pushing her out the door, she heard the little girl yelling, “¡Los campos fresas! ¡Los campos fresas!”

  Dan came out a couple of minutes later and got into the driver’s seat. Slapped her across the face. “You cunt.”

  “You bastard,” Tammy said. “Who were those girls? What are you doing with them?”

  “They’re illegals, all right?” Dan said. “I get them jobs as maids.”

  “Bull-fucking-shit,” Tammy said. “I know what business you’re in, Dan.”

  “That’s right,” Dan said. “I’m in the sex business, Tammy. I sell sex. You can’t handle that?”

  “They’re children!”

  “In Mexico? Half of them would be married by now. They’d be churning out babies already.”

  “Keep telling yourself that, you sick motherfucker.”

  “They’d be starving back home,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, they look like they’re doing great here,” Tammy said. “Fuck you, Dan, I’m calling the cops.”

  He clamped his hand around her throat, pulled her face close to his, and said, “If you do that, you stupid twat, I’ll kill you. And just in case you don’t care about your own useless life, think about the kids. Their families owe money to the guys who bring them in. If they don’t produce, the snakeheads take it out on their families. Capisce?”

  She nodded, but he didn’t let her go for a few seconds, just to make a point. To make the point further, he unzipped his fly and forced her head down. “You open your mouth, it’s for this.” When he let her up, she could see, through watery eyes, the bouncer loading the girls into an old van.

  A few seconds later, flames blew out the windows.

  Dan drove her home.

  She didn’t go to the cops. She went to the insurance company and told them that she saw him set the fire, that she could put him at the scene. It was a mistake, she’d tell Teddy later. She wanted to get back at Dan Silver, and she wanted them to look harder at the fire. Maybe they’d find something that would put them onto what was really happening there.

  She did something else.

  She looked for Luce.

  Tammy went out to the strawberry fields, los campos fresas, and looked for the girl. Her first few trips, all she saw were the workers in the fields, and then one day, she left the new strip club she was working at and went straight out to the fields, arriving there shortly before dawn.

  She saw a bunch of men leave the fields and walk down to the side of the river, where a stand of tall reeds hid the men from view. She drove down the road to the other side, parked her car, and walked in a little ways.

  Tammy waited until all the field-workers had gone away and then went in. A Mexican man with a shotgun went to stop her, but Tammy ignored him and he let her pass. She found Luce on a “bed” of stamped-down reeds. Tammy took some hand wipes out of her bag and helped the girl clean herself off.

  Speaking broken Spanish and English, she and the girl talked, but mostly she held the girl and stroked her hair. The man with the shotgun told her she’d have to go, that the pimps would come very soon to take the girls back to where they lived.

  “Where do they live?” Tammy asked.

  “All over
the place. The men move them around,” he told her. “They go to different fields all day, or to hidden ‘factories,’ sometimes to the mojado camps at night. But they always bring them to this place, the strawberry fields, at sunrise every day.” The local pedophiles had a cute name for it. They called it “The Dawn Patrol.”

  The man with the shotgun told Tammy again that she had to go.

  “Tell her I’ll be back,” Tammy said. “What’s her name?”

  The man, Pablo, asked the girl her name.

  “Luce.”

  “Luce, I’m Tammy. I’ll come back to see you, okay?”

  Tammy did go back, three or four times a week. Pablo always escorted her in, and even the pimps who brought the girls in the van came to tolerate her when they saw that she wasn’t going to go to the police. She took Luce—and all the girls—food, clothing, cold medication, books. She took them condoms. She took them female love and affection.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Tammy confided in Angela. Told her all about Luce and the strawberry fields.

  “They need medical care,” Tammy said. “They need a doctor.”

  Angela took her to see Teddy. He had done Angela’s boobs—she had done him to get the insider discount.

  Teddy didn’t believe her at first, thought she was a psycho. He felt sorry for her, figured she had been an abused child who had twisted her trauma into delusion. He was going to recommend a good psychiatrist, but Tammy challenged him to go and see for himself.

  So Teddy rode up one day with her. He wanted to call the police. Tammy begged him not to, told him why. What she needed, what the girls needed, was a doctor.

  “I’m hoping that’s you,” she said.

  It was.

  He went back again and again. At first, Pablo was hesitant, and the van drivers absolutely forbade it. But Teddy overcame their resistance with wads of cash and assurances of silence, and the men weren’t total animals. They had some compassion, and Teddy convinced them that it was in their interest to have the girls checked for venereal disease, that it was just good business.

  “The girls are raped multiple time a day, six days a week,” Teddy tells Boone now. “They give them Sundays off. The men pay five to ten dollars to have sex with them. It doesn’t sound like this would add up to a lot of money, but multiply it by several locations a day, all over California. Hell, all over the country, more and more. Now you’re talking serious money. The variety of potential and actual STDs is staggering. No matter what we do, a third of these girls are going to become HIV-positive. And then there’s vaginal trauma … anal tears. Not to mention the day-to-day garden-variety colds, flu, respiratory infections, hygiene issues. You could set up a clinic there and staff it twenty-four/seven and you’d still be overwhelmed.”

  But Teddy did what he could.

  He did set up a clinic. He rented a full-time room at the motel and stocked it with antibiotics and other drugs, hiding them in locked cabinets, as otherwise the room would be broken into and the drugs stolen. He went up there two, three, five times a week as his schedule allowed, usually with Tammy.

  The pimps tolerated them.

  As long as they got the girls in and out, as long as the girls met their schedule, as long as nobody breathed a word, it was okay. Just. There was always the threat that the operation would be shut down, and Teddy, no matter how hard he tried to argue, no matter what kind of cash he threw at them, was never, ever allowed anywhere near the “safe houses” where the girls lived.

  “ ‘Safe houses,’ ” he says to Boone. “There’s a tasty irony. More like petri dishes, fecund hothouses for bacteria. If I could get to them and institute just some basic hygienic procedures, we could eliminate at least half of the chronic diseases they suffer from.”

  But it was no good. They could never find out where the girls were housed, and they were afraid to push it. And the girls themselves changed all the time. They were shuffled around, disappearing, sometimes returning, new girls arriving every few weeks.

  It made Tammy crazy with fear.

  Once, Luce went missing for two weeks and Teddy had to sedate Tammy. When the girl returned, Tammy swore that she couldn’t go through that again, that they had to do something.

  “She loved the girl,” Teddy says. “Do you have kids?”

  Boone shakes his head.

  “I have three,” Teddy says. “By a couple of different wives. You fall in love with them, you know? And the thought of anything happening to them …”

  She decided to take Luce.

  Tammy and Angela decided that they would take the girl and raise her themselves. They knew they just couldn’t take her—that would endanger Luce’s family back in Guanajuato—so they decided to buy her.

  What kind of life could Luce have otherwise? If she survived the chronic rape, the STDs, the trauma, the exposure, the beatings, the malnutrition, psychological abuse, emotional deprivation, if she lived through her teenage years, then into her twenties, what could she expect? To be moved to an actual brothel? To a sweatshop? If she went through all of that without going to crack or getting hooked on meth, even then, what kind of life would she have?

  What’s the price of a twelve-year-old girl?

  Twenty thousand dollars.

  Because they not only had to pay for the price of a lucrative working girl; they also had to pay the always-accruing interest on her debt, the money she owed the smugglers for getting her into the country, and the interest on the debt she owed for room and board.

  Twenty large, growing every day.

  So Tammy and Angela ramped it up. They worked extra shifts. They used every trick they knew to manipulate men into taking them into the VIP Room. Once inside, they turned on all their charms to make the men fork over big tips.

  Every dance, every slide down the pole, every lap they ground themselves on went into the purchase price for Luce.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Teddy gave them the rest of the money.

  Tammy went to Danny and bought Luce.

  Cash on the barrel.

  It was good, it was done, and then—

  “The lawyers came knocking,” Boone says.

  Teddy nods.

  Danny went ballistic; he was terrified about what might come out in court, never mind just the arson suit; he made all kinds of threats. He told Tammy she could forget about Luce. The women decided to run and take the girl with them. They left their apartments and checked into the Crest Motel, intending to get a train out of town the next morning.

  They never made it.

  Luce had an sick stomach—she was upset and nervous. The vending machine at the motel was broken, so Tammy walked down to a convenience store to get a soda to try to settle Luce’s stomach.

  When she got back, Angela was dead and Luce was gone.

  Tammy panicked. She was afraid to go to her place, so she went to Angela’s, got scared there, too, and called Teddy. He picked her up and took her to Shrink’s, then volunteered to go and try to find Luce.

  Which he did.

  The girl had gone back to the only familiar place she could find.

  The strawberry fields.

  Where Boone found them.

  The rest of the story he knows.

  Boone saved Tammy from Dan at the beach below Shrink’s and then took her home. He made his deal with Red Eddie that she wouldn’t be touched. But Dan figured out something that was worth more to her than her own life, worth more than revenge or even justice for Angela’s killing.

  Luce.

  122

  “Do you have her now?” Boone asks.

  Thinking, you’re a total fucking idiot, Daniels. You read both these people so wrong, it’s pathetic. You’re not looking at a dumb, dishonest stripper and a pervert plastic surgeon. You’re looking at two heroes. And the late Angela Hart was a third.

  Tammy drops her face into her hands and starts to cry.

  Teddy says, “No, they said if everything went well, they’d call late tonight
or early tomorrow morning and turn Luce over to us. The deal is that Tammy takes Luce and never comes back.”

  Dan gets away with having Angela killed, but what’s more important? Justice, or a girl’s life? If we could talk to Angela, she’d tell us to make that trade. We can’t save them all—hell, we can’t save most of them. But we can save one. One girl gets a life.

  What’s the life of one little girl worth? Boone asks himself.

  A lot.

  Everything.

  “I can call John Kodani,” Boone says. “He’ll understand. He’ll—”

  “No cops,” Tammy says through splayed fingers.

  “Silver said that if he as much as smells the police,” Teddy says, “he’ll kill Luce.”

  He’ll kill the three of you anyway, Boone thinks. A man that evil won’t keep his word, not to you, not even to Red Eddie. A man who sinks that far into darkness fears nothing, no one, not even God or eternity.

  Tammy lifts her head and looks right at Boone. Her emerald eyes are wet with tears, swollen, and rimmed with red. She’s been crying a lot since Boone last saw her. What I’ve seen. “I’m begging you,” she says. “I’m begging you. Leave it alone. Let the girl have a shot at a life.”

  “He’s going to kill you.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” Tammy says.

  Boone says, “I’ll go with you.”

  “No,” Tammy says. “He said just me. Not even Teddy.”

  “He’s setting you up, Tammy.”

  She shrugs. Then says, “Promise me.”

  “Promise you what?” Boone asks.

  “Promise me you won’t call the police,” she says. “Promise me you won’t interfere.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  Boone starts to leave. He stops at the door, looks back, and says, “I’m sorry. For what I thought about you both. I was wrong and I’m sorry.”