“And just in case you didn’t know it, he’s got Sareena living with him now.”
That was a lie, but Clint wanted to mess with her head. Sareena was twenty-one, smart and sexy. Though Shep had claimed her as his own, he still shared her with his high-end clientele—businessmen, athletes and entertainers who were willing to fork over a few grand for an hour or two of what he got for free.
Freda’s eyes glazed with anger. It had been almost a year since she’d shared Shep’s bed.
“So go ahead,” Clint said, continuing with his taunt. “Call over there with your attitude so I can remind Shep why he should keep Sareena as his main broad and not you. That girl knows how to keep her mouth shut and do what she’s told.” He paused. “In addition to having the baddest body on the planet.”
Clint continued down the hallway, expecting a fiery retort that didn’t come. Freda wouldn’t question Shep about Sareena living with him. If she did, Shep might just put her ass back on the street. But nobody wanted a twenty-nine-year-old ho’. It was all about the young girls now.
He stopped halfway down the hallway, pulled the keys from his pocket and unlocked the three deadbolts. Brianna was huddled on the bare mattress in the fetal position, naked. The room smelled like piss. He wished he could open a window, but he couldn’t risk the girl calling out to someone on the street.
“C’mon,” he said, glaring down at her. “You’re going home. Your uncle’s been looking for you.”
A smile ignited Brianna’s drawn face. “I knew he would come get me!” she whimpered. “I knew it!”
“C’mon then. I got some clothes for you in the other room.”
Brianna tried to stand, but her weak legs couldn’t hold her up and she tumbled back to the mattress. She tried again and got halfway erect before Clint grabbed her upper arm and started moving toward the door. He dragged her across the hallway to the room he used when he spent the night at the house. It was one of only a couple of decent rooms in the place.
“What about Kaylee?” Brianna asked. “Can she come with me?”
“No,” Clint snapped. “Kaylee was smart enough to get with the program. She’s on a date right now.”
Clint tossed Brianna onto the bed, then turned around to lock the door.
He hated what he was about to do. This girl barely had breasts. He doubted his dick would even get hard.
Pulling Brianna’s iPhone from his pocket, Clint turned it on and fiddled with it until he found the camera. He was about to start the recording when something hit him.
Why did Shep want a video of him breaking Brianna in?
If the video got into the wrong hands, he would never see daylight. He and Shep went way back, but was his boy trying to set him up?
Brianna’s weak voice interrupted his thoughts. “Where are the clothes?”
Perched on the edge of the bed, she glanced around the room. Her arms were crisscrossed in a futile effort to hide her nakedness.
Clint would give Shep a video of the girl all right. But his face wouldn’t be in it.
Stepping up to the bed, he punched Brianna hard in the chest. The force of his blow sent her tumbling to the floor. He knew from experience that if he beat her before he had sex with her, she’d be much more compliant.
Clint reached down and grabbed Brianna’s arm and tossed her back onto the bed. Instead of remaining there, she charged at him and sank her teeth deep into his forearm.
Clint yelped in pain and tried to pull her off of him. When he finally did, he saw blood seep through the sleeve of his shirt. “You little bitch!”
He backhanded her across the face. In seconds, Brianna’s jaw puffed up like a water balloon.
Damn!
Shep didn’t allow hitting the girls in the face, but he couldn’t restrain himself. His arm hurt like hell.
“My Uncle Dre’s gonna get you.” Brianna’s words came out slow and garbled, as if she was drunk. Blood spewed from her lips.
With his right hand, Clint aimed the iPhone at Brianna and pushed record. Using his free hand, he yanked Brianna by the hair and slammed her head into the oak headboard over and over again.
Brianna used her fists to fight him off, but her punches felt like taps. The words coming from her bloody mouth no longer made sense.
Clint was careful to keep himself out of the video. He also didn’t say a word so the recording wouldn’t pick up his voice. He aimed the camera lower as he released Brianna’s hair and started punching her in the ribcage.
She cried and gasped as her chest heaved up and down. Suddenly, she stopped fighting him and was struggling to catch her breath.
He hoped the girl wasn’t having another asthma attack.
As Brianna fought for air, Clint backed away toward the door, his heart hammering, the camera phone still aimed in her direction.
No way this girl was going to die on his watch.
He stopped the recording, shoved the iPhone into his pocket and tore down the hallway. He found Freda sitting at the kitchen table, sulking.
“Get me that inhaler,” Clint yelled. “Now!”
Chapter 26
Day Two: 7:45 a.m.
Angela pulled her SUV into the gated parking area behind the Kenyon Juvenile Justice Center in Watts and turned off the engine. She needed a moment of solace to brace herself for another heart-wrenching day.
Around seven that morning, Angela remembered a friend who was an administrator with L.A. Unified School District. Despite the early hour, she’d given her a call and asked her to find out if there was a teacher at Crenshaw High School who had a son named Jaden Johnson. Her friend also agreed to find out whether there was a Jaden Johnson enrolled at Foshay Middle School.
After saying yet another prayer for Brianna and Dre, Angela grabbed her satchel and climbed out of her car. She greeted the sheriff’s deputy on duty at the rear door and passed through the metal detectors. As usual, the waiting area for juveniles who had matters before the court was as crowded as a hospital emergency room during flu season. She made a left at the end of the corridor and entered courtroom 264.
Juvenile court did not resemble traditional courtrooms. For one, there was no jury box, witness box or formal seating area for court watchers. Two long tables faced the judge’s elevated bench. A couple rows of folding chairs served as the gallery. The court-assigned probation officer sat off to the right with the bailiff stationed near the door.
“Hey, Carol. What’s on the calendar for today?”
The probation officer handed Angela a stack of papers. “The Public Defender’s Office had conflicts on all six of those. So they’re all yours.”
Angela thumbed through the petitions. “This is crazy.”
“You’re telling me,” Carol said with a shake of her head.
Angela quickly scanned the petitions. All six cases were juvenile girls picked up for soliciting prostitution. “Are any of them here yet?”
Carol looked down at a list on her desk, then reached up and flipped through the petitions that she had just given to Angela.
“That one, Jolita Allen, is in the back. Two others are in transit from juvenile hall.”
Angela quickly read the scant paperwork for her newest client. This was the girl’s second arrest for soliciting prostitution. After the first arrest over a year ago, she’d served six months at a juvenile camp. Angela entered a door to the left of the bench and walked down a hallway to the holding tanks.
“I need to see Jolita Allen,” she told the deputy.
She followed him as he unlocked the cell.
Jolita stood up, arms folded. “When am I gettin’ outta here?”
When Angela met a new client charged with soliciting prostitution, the girls typically displayed one of two demeanors: fear or defiance. Jolita fell into the latter category.
She was a tiny little girl, tiny even for fourteen. Her orange jailhouse jumpsuit swallowed her up. She was the color of vanilla ice cream and her dirt-brown hair was braided at the nape of her n
eck.
“Today’s your lucky day,” the deputy joked as he opened the door of the tank. “Your lawyer’s here.”
The guard escorted Angela and Jolita a few feet across the hall to an interview room which contained a table and three stackable chairs.
Jolita sat down lazily, plopped her right elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm.
“I’m Angela Evans and I’m your attorney,” Angela began. “I’m representing you on the solicitation charge. We need to go over some things before your arraignment today.”
Jolita rolled her eyes.
“What I’m saying is very important. So I want to make sure you’re listening to me.”
“Yeah, I’m listening.”
“Okay, then. What’s my name?”
Jolita smiled for the first time. “Uh, tell me one more time.”
“Angela Evans.”
“Okay, okay. I’ll remember.”
Angela began, as she did with all of her juvenile clients, by reading the pertinent parts of the petition.
“You’re being charged with Penal Code Section 647b, soliciting prostitution. You have a right to a trial or you can plead out. It’s a misdemeanor punishable by six months in a juvenile facility.”
“I can’t go back to no group home,” Jolita said. “You gotta get me outta here.”
“Where do you live?”
Jolita hesitated, which told Angela everything she needed to know. She probably lived with her pimp, but wasn’t about to admit that to her lawyer or anybody else.
“My friend, Nay-Nay.”
“How old is Nay-Nay?”
“Same age as me. She live with her older brother. He’s eighteen.”
“What’s his name?”
She hesitated again. “Ronny Green.”
According to the police report Angela had read minutes earlier, Ronny Green was a known pimp.
“The judge isn’t going to allow you to stay with them. Do you have any family members who can take you in?”
“Yeah, probably. My grandmother. But she on drugs.”
“Then the court won’t let you stay with her either.” Angela exhaled. “Where’s your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
She decided not to even ask Jolita about her father. “I’m going to see if I can find a suitable placement for you.”
“Please don’t let them send me to Dorothy Kirby. That’s like being in prison. And the girls in there are crazy.”
Her clients always begged not to be assigned to Dorothy Kirby Mental Health Center.
“Do you have a social worker?”
“Yep.”
Over ninety percent of the juveniles picked up in L.A. County for soliciting prostitution had cases with the Department of Children and Family Services. The fact that Jolita had a social worker meant that she’d been neglected, molested or subject to some other form of abuse, making her ripe for the picking by a pimp.
“What’s her name?”
“I forgot.”
Angela folder her arms. “And what’s my name?”
Jolita laughed, snapped her fingers and wiggled her neck. “Angela Evans. See, you thought I forgot. I’m very smart.”
The tragedy of her work was that most of the girls Angela represented were indeed extremely bright. If they hadn’t been raised in abusive, dysfunctional families, they never would have ended up in the hands of a pimp and likely never would have had any involvement with the criminal justice system.
Angela nodded her approval. “Very good. Let’s go over the police report. According to the undercover officer who picked you up, you were standing on Long Beach Boulevard at four in the morning waving down cars. He claims you leaned into his car and offered to, quote, suck him dry.”
Jolita shot up in her chair. “He lyin’ on me. I don’t even talk like that.”
“What about the rest of his account? Were you flagging down cars?”
Jolita slumped back in her chair. “Look, I was hungry. I was just trying to make some money to…to feed my baby.”
Jolita’s file didn’t mention anything about a child. Good God.
“You have a child?”
“Yep. Deon is two,” she said, glowing.
“Where is he?”
“He live with my Baby Daddy’s Mama.”
“I thought you said you were trying to get some money to feed your baby?”
“I was. Babies need a lot of stuff. You don’t know how much Big Deon’s Mama be sweatin’ me. I try to give her some money every now and then.”
“Where’s Big Deon?”
“In jail. But he didn’t rob no store. The police lied on him.”
Angela didn’t even want to guess how old Big Deon was.
“You’re going to go before the judge to be arraigned in a couple of hours. We’re going to plead not guilty and I’m going to see if I can get you in the STAR program.”
“What’s that?” Jolita asked.
The acronym STAR stood for Succeed Through Achievement and Resilience. The pilot program funded by a state research grant, treated juveniles arrested for prostitution-related charges as victims, rather than criminals, focusing on providing them with the resources to help them become independent, productive adults.
“It’s a program that’s going to help you get your life on track,” Angela explained. “You’re going to be closely supervised, and if you do everything the court requires you to do, the charges against you will be dismissed.”
“I don’t need nobody all up in my business.”
“Would you rather go to Dorothy Kirby?”
Jolita made a sucking sound. “Hell, no. I don’t belong in no crazy house.”
“In the STAR program you’ll have a treatment team that will—”
“I don’t need no treatment? I ain’t sick.”
Angela ignored the interruption. “You’ll be assigned a counselor and a mentor who used to be on the streets. You’ll have to get counseling, go to school every day and meet with your probation officer and social worker when you’re required to. Do you think you can manage that?”
Jolita feigned boredom, but Angela saw through it.
“That sound like it might be okay. So when can I get out of here?”
“When we go before the judge, I’ll have to see where they can place you.”
Angela would repeat this conversation with little variation at least five more times today. She had an active caseload of another dozen girls charged with solicitation whose cases were at various stages. Something was definitely wrong with the world.
Heading back into the courtroom, she asked the bailiff if any of her other clients had arrived yet. As the bailiff made a call, Angela checked her smartphone. No call or text from Dre.
She prayed that Dre found his niece soon. If he didn’t, Angela didn’t have to imagine the horrors Brianna would face. She knew them all too well.
Chapter 27
Day Two: 7:55 a.m.
Dre’s trip to Compton turned out to be a bust. The buddy he was looking for no longer lived at the same spot. He started up the car and was about to head over to his sister’s house when another idea came to him.
Five minutes later he was parking his car across the street from Maverick Middle School.
Dre figured that Brianna may have talked about this Jaden dude to some of her friends besides Sydney. He also wanted a chance to speak to Sydney without her father breathing down the girl’s neck. Maybe she knew more, but had been too afraid to say so in front of Winston.
As Dre crossed the street, he saw clusters of students heading for the entrance of the school. He pulled out his smartphone and walked up to three girls who were standing in a circle giggling.
“Excuse me,” he said, “Do any of you know this girl?” He held up a photo of Brianna on his smartphone.
One of the girls immediately stepped forward. The other two, seemed wary of him and actually took a few steps back.
“That’s Brianna Walker,” th
e girl said. Her short hair was reddish-purple and the backpack she was lugging was almost as big as she was. “Why are you asking us about her?”
“Brianna’s my niece. She didn’t come home from school yesterday and I’m trying to find her.”
One of the other girls put a hand to her mouth. Her eyes grew wide as she came closer. “Something must be really wrong then, because Brianna ain’t like that. She’s a good girl. She would never—”
“Excuse me, sir. What’s going on here?”
A skinny white woman charged up to him. “Do you girls know this man?” The woman surveyed Dre from head to toe, her eyes simmering with suspicion.
“He’s Brianna Walker’s uncle,” one of the girl’s volunteered. “They don’t know where she is.”
The woman’s eyes instantly softened. “You girls head on to class before you’re late.” She turned to Dre and extended her hand. “I’m Bonnie Flanagan. Brianna’s one of my students. What’s going on?”
Dre spent the next few minutes sharing what he learned from Sydney. A few minutes later, they were joined by a security guard and a lanky man dressed in a suit and tie. Bonnie introduced the man as Assistant Principal Richard Wainright. Dre repeated his story for their benefit.
The teacher pressed both palms to her cheeks. “I can’t believe this. Not Brianna.”
“She’s one of our best students,” Wainright said. “We’ll do whatever we can to help you find her. Have you called the police?”
Dre nodded. “Yeah, but I don’t think they’re going to do much. Have they contacted the school yet?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Wainright said. “When they do, we’ll cooperate fully.”
“I came here hoping to talk to some of Brianna’s friends. I want to find out if she spoke to any of them about the boy she met on Facebook. I’m pretty sure it’s a scam and he doesn’t exist, but maybe Brianna told them something that might be helpful.”
“Unfortunately, we can’t allow you to speak to our students,” Wainright said. “Not without their parents’ consent. But we can certainly talk to them for you and let you, as well as the police, know if we find out anything.”
Anybody's Daughter (Angela Evans Series No. 2) Page 10