24 Hours (14 page)

She shook her head like someone listening to a salesman. “My stepfather always said everybody gets what they deserve.”

“He sounds like an asshole.”

A bitter laugh. “You got that right. You ever go to a hooker?”

“No.”

“What guy admits it, right? I believe you, though. You’re one of those one-in-a-million guys who were meant to be husbands, aren’t you?”

“And fathers.”

She winced.

“You never had a child of your own?” Will asked.

“I’m not talking about that.”

“Why not?”

“Let’s just say I’ve been pregnant enough times that I can’t have kids.”

What did that mean? Multiple abortions? One bad one? “Are you sure? I was an obstetrician before I was an anesthesiologist. There are lots of new therapies for—”

“Don’t ask me any more about it,” Cheryl said in a desolate voice.

“All right.”

He turned and walked over to the picture window. There wasn’t much moon over the gulf. It was hard to see where the dark water ended and the sky began. Far below him, the lighted blue swimming pool undulated at the center of the plaza, with the paler Jacuzzi beside it. To his right lay the marina, with its stylized lighthouse and million-dollar cabin cruisers. A few bright stars shone high in the sky, but the glare from the casino sign drowned the rest. Changing focus, he saw Cheryl reflected in the glass, sitting on the bed with the gun in her lap, looking as lost as anyone he’d ever seen. He spoke without turning.

“I don’t want to beat a dead horse here. And I don’t want to pry. But I would really like to know how you ended up in prostitution. I mean, you just don’t look like one. You look too fresh. You’re beautiful, for God’s sake. How old are you?”

“Twenty-six.”

“How old is Joe?”

“Fifty.”

Twenty-four years’ difference.
“Where are you from?”

Cheryl sighed. “Do we have to play
Twenty Questions
?”

“What else is there to do?”

“I could use a drink.”

Will walked over to the phone.

“What are you doing?” she asked, laying a hand on the gun.

“Ordering you a drink. What do you like?”

She looked suspicious. “I guess it won’t hurt anything. I like rum and Coke.”

He called room service and ordered a bottle of Bacardi, a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola, and a pot of tea for himself.

“You English or something?” asked Cheryl.

“I just like tea.” What he wanted was caffeine, enough to get him through whatever was going to be required of him in the next twelve hours. He needed a pain pill, too, for his joints, but he wasn’t going to take anything that might dull his mind. He needed his edge tonight.

“So, where are you from?” he asked again.

“Nowhere. Everywhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“My dad was in the army. We moved a lot when I was a little girl.”

“My wife grew up the same way. Moving from base to base.”

She gave him a skeptical look. “I doubt much was the same about it. She was probably the colonel’s daughter or something.”

“No. Her father was a master sergeant.”

“Yeah? My father was a captain. Or so I’m told. He screwed up some way, so they never let him go to Vietnam. He took it out on my mom for one too many years, and she finally left him. We went back to her hometown, little nothing of a place in Marion County. Then she hooked up with my stepfather.” Cheryl’s eyes glazed. “That was a whole new thing. I was about ten, I guess. After he got tired of Mom in the sack, he turned to me. She was so scared he’d leave us, she wouldn’t listen to anything I said. When I turned sixteen, I got the hell out of there.”

“Where’d you go?”

“I had a girlfriend who’d gone to Hinds Junior College. She had an apartment in Jackson with two other girls. I crashed with her for a couple of weeks, got a job waiting tables. I was barely making enough to help with the rent, and her roomies got mad. One of them was dancing at this club in Jackson. She was making three hundred bucks a night. Straight, you know? Just lap dances and stuff, no tricks out back. A couple of nights, just for kicks, a bunch of us went in there and watched her dance. It wasn’t at all what I thought. I mean, some of the men were pathetic and all that, but it wasn’t humiliating. The girls were in control. For the most part, anyway. Or that’s what it looked like.”

“You started stripping?”

“Not right away. But my girlfriend got pregnant, and her boyfriend ran offshore. She went back home to Mayberry RFD, and suddenly my share of the rent went up. So I gave it a try. And it worked. I was a natural, they said. Plenty of nights I made six hundred bucks. Of course, I had to kick half of that back to the club.”

“That sounds like enough money to eventually move up to a different kind of job.”

“That’s not how it works. See, stripping is like any night job. Musician, whatever. You’ve got these long shifts. You sleep all day, so you don’t really meet normal people. You get tired as hell. I mean, have you ever danced for eight hours straight? Drinking beer and mixed drinks? Plus, you find out it’s not exactly what you thought. You’ve got your lap dances, which are fine. But then you’ve got sofa dances. A sofa dance is a little more involved. The guys want to make it, you know? It’s hand jobs on the outside of the pants, or dry humping till they get off. What you try to do is get them almost there just as the song ends. Then they’ll come across with another thirty bucks to get off at the start of the next song. You do that for eight hours, you start needing something to keep you going. To keep you from sinking too far down, you know?”

“Cocaine.”

A hint of a smile animated her lips, like a ghost smiling from within her. “The sweet thing.”

“And once you got on coke, they had you.”

“Yep. Pretty soon you’re only breaking even on the dancing, just to keep up your habit. Then you’re into
them
for money. Dancing eight hours a day, just to pay the vig on what you owe. And that’s when they hit you. There’s ways to pay off the principal.”

“Turning tricks.”

“Blow jobs in the bathroom. Half-and-half in the cars out back. Around the world in the motel up the street, after your shift.”

“Jesus.”

Her eyes looked ancient in her young face. “Girls don’t last long doing that, Doc. These are people, you know? Single mothers trying to raise kids. Girls working through junior college.”

“And Joe got you out?”

A cynical smile. “Sir Galahad to the rescue. That’s Joe. One night he paid for a trick at the motel, packed me into his car, and hauled me all the way down to New Orleans. He had a house in Gentilly. He put mattresses on the walls, boarded up the windows, and locked me in.” She shuddered at the memory. “Cold turkey. He cleaned up the vomit and brought me soup. Talk about a nightmare.”

Will tried to imagine how Joe saw this drama in his mind. He probably did see himself as some sort of knight, rescuing the fair damsel from the dark castle. And Cheryl was fair, all right. It was difficult to believe that she had endured the ravages of the life she described. Working the ERs as a resident, Will had seen twenty-six-year-old whores who looked fifty. Cheryl looked like a sorority girl from Ole Miss, poised in that bloom of youth between college and marriage. Maybe a little hard around the jaw and eyes, but otherwise unmarred.

“How the hell did you wind up kidnapping kids? Is that what Sir Galahad rescued you for?”

“It wasn’t like that. Not at first. But we needed money. Joe tried some straight things, but they never seemed to work out. And I knew how to strip. He put me in a club in Metairie, just outside New Orleans. Nice club. He stayed every night watching over me. No drugs, no drinking. I was making so much money, we couldn’t believe it. Everybody said I was better than the featured dancers who came through, you know, Penthouse pets, girls like that. So I got into that for a while.” Cheryl’s eyes suddenly lit up, the way Abby’s did when she was telling someone about her doll collection. “I had a dozen different outfits, props, the whole works. I had a Jeep Grand Cherokee, and we’d drive around the country, following my club tour. Texas, Colorado, Montana . . . man, it was something.”

“But?”

She looked down at the gun in her lap. “Joe got jealous. I was good enough that people started talking to me about other things. Movie people. Not like Sandra Bullock, you know, but still Hollywood. Soft porn stuff, like you see on Cinemax. And Joe got nervous about that. He didn’t . . . He—”

“He didn’t want you out from under,” Will said. “He wanted you all to himself, all the time.”

She nodded sadly. “Yeah.”

“You couldn’t break loose?”

“I owed him, okay? I owed him in a way only me and him understood.”

“For getting you off crack?”

“Not just that, okay?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where’s my damn drink?”

As though in answer to her question, a knock sounded at the door. Will walked through the sitting room of the suite and accepted the tray from a young Mexican girl. He tipped her liberally, then hung out the DO NOT DISTURB sign and carried the tray in to Cheryl.

“How did you owe Joe?” he asked, pouring Bacardi and Coke over the small hotel ice cubes.

She took the glass and drank a long sip of the sweet mixture. Then another. She clearly meant to finish the drink before continuing. Will poured himself a steaming cup of tea, added sugar and lemon. The scent of Earl Grey wafted through the bedroom.

Cheryl finished her rum and Coke and held out the glass for a refill. Will mixed another—stronger this time—then took a sip of tea and sat on the edge of the bed.

“How did you owe him, Cheryl?”

“You don’t just walk away from the kind of work I was doing at the club in Jackson,” she said quietly. “I owed them money, and they wanted me working it off. When I started dancing in Metairie, they heard about it. They sent a couple of guys down to get me. Joe offered to pay my debts, but they wouldn’t go for it. They wanted me back at the club. The guy who owned the place . . . he had a thing for me.”

“So what happened?”

A little laugh rippled the bruised flesh of her abdomen. “Joe convinced these guys to change their minds.”

“How did he do that?”

“Convincingly.”

“And they left you alone?”

“Those guys did.”

“And?”

“The owner sent another guy for me. To bring me back. A really bad guy.”

“And what happened?”

Another swallow. “Joe punched his ticket.”

“You mean he killed him?”

Cheryl looked Will right in the eye. “That’s what I mean. Messy, too. So that anybody else they sent would know what he was getting into. You know? And it worked. Nobody else came. I was free.”

“You weren’t exactly free. You’d just traded one master for another.”

“Hey, I ain’t nobody’s slave.”

“Who are you trying to convince?”

“Shut up.”

“You carry a lot of pain around, don’t you?”

“Don’t we all?”

“Yes. But I don’t think Joe understands that. He thinks he’s got a monopoly on suffering. That everything’s stacked against him from the start.”

“How do you know it wasn’t? You sit up there in your perfect little house, with your money and your kid and your paintings and your swimming pool and your cars. Everything laid out just right since the day you were born. Well, some people don’t have it that way.”

“Is that what you think? You think I started rich? My father worked in a mill for eighteen years, Cheryl. No college degree. Then the mill shut down. He put his life savings into his dream, a music store. Every dollar he had went into Wurlitzer organs, Baldwin pianos, and brass band instruments. Five months after he opened it, the store burned to the ground. His insurance had lapsed two days before.” Will reached out and took a shot from the Bacardi bottle. “He drove off a bridge a week later. I was eleven years old.”

Cheryl shook her head. “You must have inherited something. You’re silver spoon all the way.”

Will laughed bitterly. “My wife’s mother was a waitress. Karen was the first woman in her family to go to college. Then nursing school. Then medical school, but she had to drop out because she got pregnant. And her father died before he could see how well she did. She fought for everything she has. So did I.”

“The American dream,” Cheryl mumbled. “Get out the violins.”

“I’m just pointing out that Joe seems to have a personal problem with me. Some kind of class thing. And he’s way off base.”

She looked up, her eyes alert. “How much money do you make a year?”

“About four hundred thousand dollars.”

“He’s not that far off.”

Will had understated his income, and he doubted Cheryl had any concept of the kind of royalties he would earn from Restorase. “I can give you a lot more money than that, Cheryl. If you’ll help me save Abby, I mean. Enough to get you away clean. Really free. Forever.”

A faint flicker of hope lighted her eyes, then died. “You’re lying, sweetie. You’d rat me out the first chance you got.”

“Why would I? I’d have nothing to gain.”

“Because it’s the nature of things. I’d do the same. If you had my kid, I’d be over there right now giving you the sofa dance of your life. I’d take you to bed and give you around-the-world like you never imagined it before.” A note of professional pride entered her voice. “I can do things for you that your wife never even heard of. That your wildest old girlfriend never heard of. When was the last time you got off four times in one night?”

Will treated this as a rhetorical question.

“I thought so. But you could. I could make you. And if you had my kid, I would. Gladly. But as soon as I had my kid back, I’d rat you out.”

He started to argue, but there was no point. She would not be persuaded.

Cheryl held up her drink in a mock toast. “Don’t feel bad, Doc. Like I said, it’s just the nature of things.”

Will had stopped listening. He was thinking about what Cheryl had said she would do to save her child, if she had one. And about why Hickey had chosen to spend the night with Karen rather than with him. And what Karen would or would not do to save Abby.