Seventeen
Her street name was Angel. Angel was a prostitute,
and she felt satisfied with her lot in life. It had never mattered much
to her that she had dropped out of junior high, that she had forgotten how
to read and write. She had a pretty face, she liked men, and she raked in
two or three hundred dollars on a good night. What more could a girl
want?
Book learning was overrated, in her studied opinion,
as were the scare stories of AIDS she was hearing about on the street.
She chalked them down to police propaganda. Still, her age was beginning
to show even at twenty-eight. The older she got, the more complicated the
world seemed to get. She couldn't imagine how she would survive in the
business if things got any worse. Men were handing her VISA cards. She
had tried banks only once in her life, and had quit when a lost ID had
cost her a late rent payment, an eviction from her apartment, and a night
in jail for trying to sleep in the parked car of a john.
She slept from dawn to dusk. From dusk to about
midnight was her personal time. She seldom ventured from her room during
those hours. From midnight on, she was the only working girl to wander
along the bars on the run-down east end of Eagle Junction. The town was
too small to have its own police force, and Sheriff Packerson lived and
let live, as long as there weren't too many girls on the street at one
time, as long as they were of age, and as long as their customers filed no
complaints with the sheriff's department. Eagle Junction was a nice place
to work, because Gene hated pimps with a passion.
Angel's customers were local, most of them married
and older men with money to spend. One motel in town catered to the
salesmen and tourists passing through, but she left those to the younger
girls looking for meal tickets elsewhere. The Eagle's Knoll Night Club
was her own private stomping ground. She usually had a john to entertain
for the night within an hour or two, and one a night was plenty. Quickies
were for the bimbos. Angel specialized in older men and cuddling and the
time it took for them to get it up and do something useful with it.
Rather than perch herself on an uncomfortable
barstool and endure the roar of the jukebox, the stench of alcohol-tainted
halitosis, and the gruesome passes of red-faced drunks, Angel paced the
clean night air along the stone facade of the bar. The gaudy neon light
hid the defects of her beauty, and shadows cast from the colored lights
overhead showed her figure to its best advantage. She baited passing
prospects with body language, but she always had the final choice of who
she would spend the night with. She frowned on strangers and cheap
motels, holding out until at least three in the morning for old standbys
who whipped out Ben Franklins with a smile and owned homes with king-sized
beds and roofs to cover them. After three, she was fair game for anyone.
A cold ocean breeze and the smell of rain had moved
in past midnight. Angel quickened her pace to keep warm. She wore a mink
wrap tight around her shoulders and neck and left her long legs barred to
sell the merchandise. She scanned passing traffic, wishing as usual for a
warm Cadillac to rescue her from the cold fog.
Hours came and went without a taker. She had
forgotten what day it was. Tuesday, she figured. Business on Tuesdays
sucked. She started to turn back to the warmth and rowdy camaraderie of
the bar for a drink before heading home empty-handed.
"Miss?"
When she swung her head back around, he was standing
less than five feet away, a bent little man with long gray hair, thick
glasses, and a sad, but knowing smile. He wasn't one of her regulars.
She had never seen him before. And he looked like trouble.
"Yeah?"
"We have special need of your skills."
Angel reared back in surprise and amusement. "Oh,
yeah? My skills, you say? What is you think I am, mister, a carpenter?"
He smiled tolerantly. "You know what I mean."
"Like hell I know what you mean." It was standard
policy from the few days she had tried the streets of San Francisco.
Confess your profession to an undercover cop and you get busted. She had
gotten busted too many times in San Francisco and had gone home in
disgrace. Eagle Junction had no undercover cops, but she had discovered
that the constant denial encouraged respect and maintained a certain
dignity to the transaction.
"Maid service, perhaps?" He pulled a wallet from his
back pocket and extracted a handful of bills. Despite the gloom, the four
fifty dollar bills glowed with a light of their own, clear and sharp and
unmistakable. "We would enjoy the presence of your company, miss, if you
have the time."
"We?" She shook her head in exasperation. "I'm not
into groups, mister."
"That's not at all what we had in mind."
"Yeah, sure." But the strange little man radiated
about as much passion as a refrigerated pickle. She could sense such
things in a male, and this one was definitely strange. "What exactly do
you have in mind?"
He held the four bills out and said nothing.
"Take it or leave it? Mister, I'd rather leave it
than deal with weirdoes."
"We won't touch."
Dirty talk? She had spanked more than a few
guilt-ridden pensioners in her day. Some guys were strange that way.
"Where?" she said curtly.
"Up on the Ridge?"
Were there new residents on the Ridge? She hadn't
heard of any. Still, the houses were close together on the Ridge, and a
scream for help would carry for miles in the open.
She reached for the bills he offered. He snatched
them out of reach. Smiling, he reached down and tucked them into the
purse clutched in her hand.
She gestured with mock politeness. "Where's your
car?"
He held his palms out. "Alas, I have no car. Will
you be so kind as to call us a cab?"
Angel raised an eyebrow. "A cab?"
But a cab would be safer still, although she
refrained from smiling at her strange little customer and the way he kept
inching back into the shadows. Shy men who feared her touch usually liked
to watch, but they could be dangerously kinky. At the first suggestion of
bondage, she would run, and if he so much as blocked her way, she would
show him how loudly she could scream and how hard she could kick.
Angel jerked a thumb over her shoulder to indicate
the pay phone at the door. The dirty little man could call his own cab.
"I don't have change. If you would be so kind..."
She opened her purse in mock disgust and rummaged for
a quarter. For one panicky moment, she could not see the four bills he
had put inside. She thought she had been scammed. Then they all but
popped out at her. With a sigh of relief, she extracted a quarter and
went to the phone to call for a cab.
Eagle Junction had one cab company and a total of
three cars. At two in the morning, it took less than five minutes for a
familiar Plymouth Reliant to pull to the curb. Her date made no effort to
open the door for her. The moment she climbed in back and closed her
door, the cab lurched forward.
"Mike, wait for my friend!"
The cab lurched to a stop. Mike looked wildly
about. "Who the hell are you talking about? I didn't see no one else!"
Angel never heard the door opposite her open and
close. But there he sat, sitting close at her at her side, smiling.
Mike looked at her through his rear view mirror.
"Angel, are we having a difficult night?"
"Well, just don't sit here! Go!"
The cab lurched forward. "Go where, Angel?"
"West, one mile outside town," her date said softly.
Mike looked around. "Angel? Are we on something
tonight?"
"He said west, one mile outside town!"
Mike grimaced. “Who said?” He shook his head, but
concentrated on his driving.
The drive took less than five minutes. Mike slowed
on the dark highway. "This is your one mile outside town, Angel. Are we
headed up the Ridge? I can take you the rest of the way."
Angel looked to her customer for an answer to the
question. The strange little man pointed up the side of the slope and
when Angel bent over to look, she saw the lighted house nearby.
"Stop here, Mike."
"Angel, for Pete's sake..."
"Mike, please stop!"
Mike stopped the car with a squeal of tires. "Okay,
so I'm stopped."
Angel threw her door open. When her date made no
move to extract his wallet to pay Mike, Angel opened her purse with a
groan of frustration. As before, in one heart-stopping moment, the fifty
dollar bills were not visible. And then they were. She rummaged through
her own change for something smaller than a fifty and handed Mike a ten.
"Keep the change."
"Angel, what hell's going on with you tonight?"
She climbed out and slammed the door behind her. The
cab spun in a half circle with a squeal of tires and accelerated hard back
toward town.
"Mike, wait!"
He had left with her customer still inside the car!
But she froze on tiptoes with her arm thrown in the
air. Ten feet away, the little man smiled at her like the Chestershire
cat. She hadn't seen him get into the car. She hadn't seen him get out.
Spooked, she lowered her arm and pulled her stole a bit tighter around her
shoulders.
The man turned away to take the lead. Angel glanced
up at the lighted house with a frown. She had lived in Eagle Junction her
entire life. She had visited the Ridge just last week. She could not
remember seeing this house before.
She hurried after the little man rather than be
stranded alone in the darkness. She expected a flight of stairs to take
them up to the house. Instead, she encountered knee-high weeds.
"You've got to be kidding!"
Her cry echoed in the night. He glanced back with a
smile and waited for her to catch up.
She followed at a safe distance, growing more wary by
the minute. She was always slow in recognizing when people were taking
advantage of her. Letting a complete stranger drag her out into the night
in the middle of nowhere had been foolish.
She moaned in growing agitation, but continued on
with professional patience and stubbornness. He had paid particularly
well, and she still trusted her instincts. Her date was a cold fish. He
had no interest in ordinary sex. He was either after something droll and
harmless, or she had been recruited for someone else's pleasure. As long
as she could keep her distance from danger, she would give her funny
little pervert the benefit of the doubt. She had no doubts whatsoever
that she could outrun him. Her long, strong legs and feet callused by
Pacific beaches had never failed her in that regard.
The man went onto the porch of a small house and
opened the front door. Warm orange light glowed out into the night. He
turned back to her. "I have one request to ask of you that you might find
strange."
"I find you pretty damned strange," Angel said
bluntly.
He chuckled. "I guess I am at that. I feel rather
strange myself. I can't remember a time of my life when I meant less harm
to an attractive young woman. I confess I've always liked them a bit
younger than yourself."
"How much younger?" Angel asked suspiciously.
"A whole lot younger. All of that is water under the
bridge now. Will you indulge me?"
Angel nodded to the house. "Who else is in there?"
"There is absolutely nobody in the house."
"What do you want?"
"I want for you to remove your clothing before
entering the house."
"Sort of like the Japanese taking off their shoes?"
"Clothes have been an inconvenience. They clog
channels of acquisition, so to speak. I would prefer that you leave them
outside."
"And what happens when I get inside?"
His amused smile faded. "We have more to offer than
anything the future holds in store for you an your own. We have more to offer than
you can imagine. And you have more to offer us in our time of need than
anyone else in your little town, almost as much as we will ever need."
"I'm only good for one thing," Angel said defiantly,
hoping that she wasn't being insulted in some subtle fashion for her
profession. It had always been, as far as she could see, an honorable way
to make a living. She had never hurt anyone.
"Agreed," the man said eagerly. "It is exactly than
we need. Your kind heart."
"My kind heart. Yeah, right."
"Your innocence, Angel. And your kind heart.
Mine has been tainted. It won't do at all."
He seemed oddly sincere. And harmless. She sensed
that they were alone, and Angel knew better than to ask too many
questions. Customers had been known to cancel transactions in their
exasperation with her difficulty in reaching a decision. "Okay, have it
your own way."
She set her purse down, kicked her shoes off, dropped
her mink stole on top, and reached down for the hem of her dress. Drawing
it up and over her head removed every remaining item of clothing she was
wearing. But without the snug fitting dress, stark naked, she could run
like the wind.
She reached down for her purse and the two hundred
dollars it contained.
"Leave it, please."
Angel's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Like hell, I
will."
He gave an impatient nod. "Then bring the purse, if
you must."
Angel felt silly carrying nothing but her purse onto
the porch. She hurried into the warm light on bare feet, chilled to the
bone by the dark night at her back. She stepped through the front door.
Reality suddenly changed. The interior of the house
filled her field of vision in one moment. In the next, she was surrounded
by dark trees and the strong odor of dense underbrush. She put her bare
foot down upon nothingness. For the briefest instant, she saw a mirror
before her reflecting the star-dusted sky. And then she plunged naked
through it.
Behind her, her purse crashed against the surface of
the mirror and spilled its contents.
