After sustaining the worst beating of her sixteen years, Pamela Madden had slipped out her first-floor bedroom window and walked the four miles to the center of the bleak, dusty town. She’d caught a Greyhound bus for Houston before dawn, only because it had been the first bus, and it hadn’t occurred to her to get off anywhere in between. So far as she could determine, her parents had never even reported her as missing. A series of menial jobs and even worse housing in Houston had merely given emphasis to her misery, and in short order she’d decided to head elsewhere. With what little money she’d saved, she’d caught yet another bus – this one Continental Trailways – and stopped in New Orleans. Scared, thin, and young, Pam had never learned that there were men who preyed on young runaways. Spotted almost at once by a well-dressed and smooth-talking twenty-five-year-old named Pierre Lamarck, she’d taken his offer of shelter and assistance after he had sprung for dinner and sympathy. Three days later he had become her first lover. A week after that, a firm slap across the face had coerced the sixteen-year-old girl into her second sexual adventure, this one with a salesman from Springfield, Illinois, whom Pam had reminded of his own daughter – so much so that he’d engaged her for the entire evening, paying Lamarck two hundred fifty dollars for the experience. The day after that, Pam had emptied one of her pimp’s pill containers down her throat, but only managed to make herself vomit, earning a savage beating for the defiance.
Kelly listened to the story with a serene lack of reaction, his eyes steady, his breathing regular. Inwardly it was another story entirely. The girls he’d had in Vietnam, the little childlike ones, and the few he’d taken since Tish’s death. It had never occurred to him that those young women might not have enjoyed their life and work. He’d never even thought about it, accepting their feigned reactions as genuine human feelings – for wasn’t he a decent, honorable man? But he had paid for the services of young women whose collective story might not have been the least bit different from Pam’s, and the shame of it burned inside him like a torch.
By nineteen, she’d escaped Lamarck and three more pimps, always finding herself caught with another. One in Atlanta had enjoyed whipping his girls in front of his peers, usually using light cords. Another in Chicago had started Pam on heroin, the better to control a girl he deemed a little too independent, but she’d left him the next day, proving him right. She’d watched another girl die in front of her eyes from a hot-shot of uncut drugs, and that frightened her more than the threat of a beating. Unable to go home – she’d called once and had the phone slammed down by her mother even before she could beg for help – and not trusting the social services which might have helped her along a different path, she finally found herself in Washington, DC, an experienced street prostitute with a drug habit that helped her to hide from what she thought of herself. But not enough. And that, Kelly thought, was probably what had saved her. Along the way she’s had two abortions, three cases of venereal disease, and four arrests, none of which had ever come to trial. Pam was crying now, and Kelly moved to sit beside her.
‘You see what I really am?’
‘Yes, Pam. What I see is one very courageous lady.’ He wrapped his arm tightly around her. ‘Honey, it’s okay. Anybody can mess up. It takes guts to change, and it really takes guts to talk about it.’
The final chapter had begun in Washington with someone named Roscoe Fleming. By this time Pam was hooked solidly on barbiturates, but still fresh and pretty-looking when someone took the time to make her so, enough to command a good price from those who liked young faces. One such man had come up with an idea, a sideline. This man, whose name was Henry, had wanted to broaden his drug business, and being a careful chap who was used to having others do his bidding, he’d set up a stable of girls to run drugs from his operation to his distributors. The girls he bought from established pimps in other cities, in each case a straight cash transaction, which each of the girls found ominous. This time Pam tried to run almost at once, but she’d been caught and beaten severely enough to break three ribs, only later to learn of her good fortune that the first lesson hadn’t gone further. Henry had also used the opportunity to cram barbiturates into her, which both attenuated the pain and increased her dependence. He’d augmented the treatment by making her available to any of his associates who wanted her. In this, Henry had achieved what all the others had failed to do. He had finally cowed her spirit.
Over a period of five months, the combination of beatings, sexual abuse, and drugs had depressed her to a nearly catatonic state until she’d been jarred back to reality only four weeks earlier by tripping over the body of a twelve-year-old boy in a doorway, a needle still in his arm. Remaining outwardly docile, Pam had struggled to cut her drug use. Henry’s other friends hadn’t complained. She was a much better lay this way, they thought, and their male egos had attributed it to their prowess rather than her increased level of consciousness. She’d waited for her chance, waiting for a time when Henry was away somewhere, because the others got looser when he wasn’t around. Only five days earlier she’d packed what little she had and bolted. Penniless – Henry had never let them have money – she’d hitched her way out of town.
‘Tell me about Henry,’ Kelly said softly when she’d finished.
‘Thirty, black, about your height.’
‘Did any other girls get away?’
Pam’s voice went cold as ice. ‘I only know of one who tried. It was around November. He … killed her. He thought she was going to the cops, and’ – she looked up – ‘he made us all watch. It was terrible.’
Kelly said quietly, ‘So why did you try, Pam?’
‘I’d rather die than do that again,’ she whispered, the thought now out in the open. ‘I wanted to die. That little boy. Do you know what happens? You just stop. Everything stops. And I was helping. I helped kill him.’
‘How did you get out?’
‘Night before … I … fucked them all… so they’d like me, let me … let me out of their sight. You understand now?’
‘You did what was necessary to escape,’ Kelly replied. It required every bit of his strength to keep his voice even. ‘Thank God.’
‘I wouldn’t blame you if you took me back and set me on my way. Maybe Daddy was right, what he said about me.’
‘Pam, do you remember going to church?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember the story that ends, “Go forth and sin no more”? You think that I’ve never done something wrong? Never been ashamed? Never been scared? You’re not alone, Pam. Do you have any idea how brave you’ve been to tell me all this?’
Her voice by now was entirely devoid of emotion. ‘You have a right to know.’
‘And now I do, and it doesn’t change anything.’ He paused for a second. ‘Yes, it does. You’re even gutsier than I thought you were, honey.’
‘Are you sure? What about later?’
‘The only “later” thing I’m worried about is those people you left behind,’ Kelly said.
‘If they ever find me …’ Emotion was coming back now. Fear. ‘Every time we go back to the city, they might see me.’
‘We’ll be careful about that,’ Kelly said.
‘I’ll never be safe. Never.’
‘Yeah, well, there’s two ways to handle that. Yon can just keep running and hiding. Or you can help put them away.’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘The girl they killed. They knew. They knew she was going to the cops. That’s why I can’t trust the police. Besides, you don’t know how scary these people are.’
Sarah had been right about something else, Kelly saw. Pam was wearing her halter again, and the sun had given definition to the marks on her back. There were places which the sun didn’t darken as it did the others. Echoes of the welts and bloody marks that others had made for their pleasure. It had all started with Pierre Lamarck, or more correctly, Donald Madden, small, cowardly men who managed their relations with women through force.
Men? Kelly asked himself.
No.
Kelly told her to stay in place for a minute and headed off into the machinery bunker. He returned with eight empty soda and beer cans, which he set on the ground perhaps thirty feet from their chairs.