NIGHT CRUISING (28 page)

If they would untie her
she'd have a chance. She even held out her bound wrists to him,
thinking if he wanted to rape her he'd have to get her onto her back
first, and that meant untying her hands and feet. But again what she
thought might be her protection was no trouble at all to the drunken
group who had descended upon her like locusts.

They refused to untie
her. There was a wagging of heads in the negative until the girl
realized it was no use. That might make Cruise unhappy and no one
wanted the big, grizzly American unhappy. No, they'd leave her bound
hand and foot to the car door, the easier to play with her. The
easier it was to terrify. She tried to claw, to spit, to bite, but
nothing she did proved a deterrent.

Molly bucked and fought
to keep the strangers' hands off her body, but it was a losing
proposition. The man hanging halfway in her window had his head
buried against her chest. His mouth kept slipping off her nipples
onto her ribs as she tried to thrust him away. His mustache scorched
paths that smelled of tequila across her naked skin.

Meanwhile the man in
the seat next to her worked to unzip her jeans enough to get his hand
inside. When he'd succeeded, the two leering faces on the windshield
shouted with demonic glee.

Two men got into the
back seat and leaned over the Igloo cooler to watch the proceedings.
One of them tried to kiss her until she butted his chin with the top
of her head.

This went on. It went
on and on until Molly tired of fighting back. Already she'd drawn
blood where the ropes held her prisoner. Her lip had split in the
melee and dripped blood down her neck. One man had his mouth on her
breast. Another had two of his fingers searching blindly inside her.
Someone caressed the back of her neck and shoulders.

Molly couldn't scream;
she couldn't fight anymore. She went limp. A plastic doll would have
been more sport. It took a while, but after some minutes passed and
she showed no reaction to the probings, fondlings, and suckling going
on, the drunken bunch tired of the game. They cursed her and one
another. They took her face in their hands and shook it until her
eyes rolled. The man with his hand inside her jeans caught her
tightly there and squeezed to see if she would flinch.

She slumped into the
seat, her limpness not a ruse, but an admittance of futility. She
couldn't do anything. Her body was not her own while they worked so
hard to possess it.

Let them have it.
That's what she thought.
Let them have it if they want it so
fucking bad.

Soon she was alone in
the car, the drunks staggering and laughing over the incident as they
headed into the cantina and the music. They could spend themselves on
the willing women inside. They weren't really going to rape Cruise's
girl without his permission anyway; it was all a rowdy, little game.

Her blouse was in rags
hanging off her shoulders. Her bra was torn apart in the center, the
cups lying on each side by her arms. Her jeans were undone down to
the tops of her bikini panties. She might be a fashion plate for a
club that went in for body slamming.

She sat this way
without one tear making a track down her cheeks. She had no way to
cover herself, not with her hands tied to the door. She must remain
half clothed until

Cruise returned to the
car to see about her. When that would be, she didn't know. Until then
she was at the mercy of any man who happened by the car and saw her.
She was an open invitation to any horny Mexican who came in or out of
the cantina.

And that's just the
way it is
, she thought, at peace once she accepted her fate.

Her luck was still
holding out even though it wasn't the best luck in the world. At
least she wasn't dead. Or raped.

Not quite.

She didn't feel so
good, though. She didn't feel right anymore. She could tell she
hadn't been feeling all right again since Cruise killed the woman in
the store. When he tried to run her down with the car something
inside her really snapped. She thought she might be getting to a
place where she...just...didn't...care.

A small black dog crept
to the car and sniffed at the ground. Molly looked down at it and
watched until it went away, limping. She listened to the sounds of
music and laughter. She smelled the sick-making mingled aromas of
spilled beer and cooking beans.

As the sky grew light
and the sun began to rise, some of the cantina patrons came outside
and trotted away, none of them paying any attention to where she sat
staring through the windshield.

A skinny red rooster
swaggered down the street crowing for a majestic dawn. The stray dog
that sniffed the Chrysler earlier scurried out now from between two
houses and chased off the lone rooster.

For a while the town
seemed deserted. The music had stopped. The laughter was gone. No car
passed.

Molly lay her head back
on the headrest and closed her eyes.

Cruise would come for
her when he was ready.

Until then she would
try to sleep since the help she longed for wasn't available in
Mexicali, Mexico.

The movie behind the
closed lids of her eyes took her back to Dania, Florida, where once
she had been safe. It was a day with her counselor. She sat in a
starched white room where the plaster on the walls had been swirled
to create circular patterns. The furniture was the best money could
buy. There was a white leather sofa, a club chair to match, a blond
coffee table bare of adornment. Across from this magazine-perfect
arrangement sat Jason Harcraft behind his mahogany desk. The desk so
dark, so smooth and rich, dwarfed Jason, and made whatever advice he
gave sound weak. Molly had a hard time taking him seriously.

"All teens rebel,"
he was saying. "It's a natural process of growing up. You have
to break the bonds from your father so you can become an adult."

"So what's the
problem?" She was a smart ass even then, but it never got her
into dutch with Jason. He was understanding. Too much so. He let her
get away with murder. He was indulgent in the extreme. If she had
taken a ballpoint pen from her purse and stabbed holes in his
brilliant white leather sofa, she expected he'd
tsk-tsk
and
ask her to sit in the chair so the holes wouldn't snag her clothing.

"The problem,"
he said, infinitely patient, "is your particular brand of
rebelliousness is worrying to your father. We need to
modify
the methods you employ to break the parental bond."

"How do you
suggest I do that, Jason?" He liked her to call him by his
Christian name. Mr. Harcraft, he said, sounded like an airplane
inventor. She thought it was because he wanted to be twenty again. He
wore his thinning hair combed over the bald spot where the hair had
receded on his forehead. It was sad. "My dad is a former Marine
boot-camp instructor. We can't forget that."

"No." He
stroked the front edge of his desk as he spoke. "We can't forget
that, can we?"

Molly shrugged, bored.
It was all sunshine and fun outside. She could go down to the beach
and lounge in the sand, walk in the surf, pick a bouquet of wild
hibiscus. She could go to the marina in Ft. Lauderdale and watch the
million-dollar yachts steam into dock. Yet here she was stuck in a
modern white office with an understanding man. Some days she thought
she actually preferred her father over the mealy-mouthed Jason
Harcrafts of this world.

"It is precisely
because of your father's background that the two of you are having
many of your disputes," he said.

"Meaning I'm as
normal as apple pie."

He wagged his thinning
cranium. "I don;t know if I'd go so far as state you're behaving
absolutely normally. You do have a certain talent to provoke your
father into... uh...rages."

Boy, did she. She could
look at him cross-eyed and he'd get mad. Why are you looking at me
that way? he'd ask. What have you done that would make you look at me
that way?

"He won't let me
do anything, she complained. "He's worried about all the reports
of drugs and sex in the schools."

"Yes, well, most
parents are concerned about that..."

"He doesn't know
about the guns."

That perked Jason's
ears. "Guns?"

She took on her cloak
of ultra-cool. She knew something the adults didn't know. All the
kids knew a thousand secrets that would blow the domes off the
capital buildings in every city in the country. "Kids carry them
to school," she said matter-of-factly. "Lots of kids. Lots
of guns. You didn't know that?"

Jason leaned forward
until his elbows rested on the desktop. "Why wouldn't the
teachers know about it and take preventative steps?"

Oh, so he didn't
believe her. They never did. The world kids lived in was so alien to
adults that they couldn't quite grasp the picture. "The
teachers," she said, "don't hang out with the kids. They
see them in class, that's it. During lunch they go into the teachers'
lounge, they stick together."

"Why are there so
many guns in school then?"

"Guys carry them
for protection. There are gangs. The Jamaicans. The Vietnamese. They
get picked on so they go packing. Everyone knows. Some kid not in a
gang wants to be tough or he thinks he might get hassled, he packs.
He lets everyone know about it too. Even some of the girls carry."

"Doesn't it scare
you?"

She shrugged, the cloak
of cool firmly in place. "Not much. I'm used to it. Someone's
got a gun and he asks to borrow a pen or paper in class, you don't
refuse him. You just do what he says and it's okay."

"Hmmm." He
was back to rubbing the desk edge. "It sounds as if school is a
dangerous sort of environment."

She could have said
no
shit, Sherlock
, but instead she laughed. "It ain't Disney
World."

"How do the kids
at school hide all these guns?"

"The guys wear
baggy overcoats like raincoats, you know? I know one guy carries a
sawed-off shotgun fitted into a special holster under his coat."

"Where do they get
hold of these weapons?"

"Buy 'em off the
street. Bring them from home."

He looked so saddened,
so out of touch with reality, that she felt sorry for him. "You
can't tell my dad."

"About the guns?"

'Right. If you do,
he'll put me in a private school. It's no better there. The richer
the kids are, the looser the rules. I'm better off in the public
system."

"Is it the state
of the schools that causes you to argue with your father?"

At last. Jason had
found a pertinent question, something that went to the real heart of
the matter.

"Not really,"
she admitted sheepishly. "He's just a pain in the ass
sometimes."

"You can't try to
compromise?"

"He's too tough.
He wants too much. As in perfect
fealty
. That's a Marine word,
I think."

"Might it be
because he loves you? He wants to protect you. He wants you to be
happy?"

She thought it over. "I
guess so. But that doesn't make it any easier. He just won't give me
any slack. He hounds me all the fucking time." She said
fucking
to test him.

He didn't bat an
eyelash. Christ on a stick, he was so understanding.

"We'll talk
again," Jason said, rising from behind the massive desk.
Standing, he wasn't such a tiny man. He looked more human, not like
some kind of circus freak who had wandered into a room full of
outsize furniture.

She knew her time was
over. She could go to the beach now, but if she was late getting home
her father would give her the third-degree. He set his watch by her
comings and goings. He was a hawk, she his scurrying, earthbound
prey.

Outside the
glass-walled building in the afternoon sunshine, she paused on the
steps to breathe in the fruity scent of a nearby flowering mimosa
shedding its shrimp-pink blossoms in the breeze.

She might as well go
home. Ask his permission. It would make things easier. She'd have to
explain why she wanted to go to the beach, who she was going with,
when she'd be back, what she planned to do when there. But maybe that
was the kind of compromise Jason meant to encourage. Give the old man
his chance to act out his role. Play along. Stop fighting the
inevitable.

She did that until she
couldn't do it anymore. She listened to Jason and his common sense
advice until it was coming out her ears. She compromised until she
wanted to scream.

And then she packed her
things and hit the road.
Just like that
. Without thinking it
all through.

And here she was
,
opening her eyes on an adobe cantina yellowing in the morning sun,
hog-tied like some animal, clothes in tatters, her body a plaything
for stinking, drunken strangers, and, worst of all, hostage to
another adult. One who wouldn't just yell at her for being out late
or bringing home a B- or wearing her skirts too short.

She was smart all
right. She was cloaked down to her toes in cool. She had swapped
semi-freedom with a father who loved her for imprisonment with a man
who didn't know what love meant.
She was a regular genius.

What would Jason
Harcraft, the venerable counselor to troubled teens, have to say
about that?

#

Cruise pushed at the
girl's thighs and said, "Spread your legs more."

She wasn't much beyond
Molly's age. Cruise liked her because she spoke good English. He
didn't have to struggle with the language to get what he wanted.

She did as she was told
and he sat back on his naked haunches to play with her. It was almost
day and he had used her twice already. Soon he would order her from
the pom and sleep like a baby in a silken crib.

They had brought in a
noisy box fan and installed it in the window for him. The breeze wove
over their bodies, ruffling his long hair, drying all her natural
juices so that her soft pink flesh felt like the petals of a rose. He
stroked between her upraised knees until she moaned and squirmed.
Girls her age were insatiable, couldn't get enough.