I followed her steel gaze to a guy standing at the end of the bar, looking over the crowd like he was deciding who to gun down. He wasn’t wearing the jacket, but the collar of his black shirt stood at alert the same way. He was every lounge lizard in every cop movie made in the 1980s. And he was Wendy’s bad guy.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s evil, Gray. I don’t know about this.”
“Go,” she said. “I’ve got it handled.”
She gave me a push and I was gone, slithering through the press of men who fortunately only had eyes for the woman on the tiny stage who was . . . I didn’t see what she was doing because I didn’t look long enough. I didn’t want to know if it was Wendy. I ducked behind the curtain that someone had obviously marinated in gin and squinted against the glare on the other side.
Once I could see, I realized I was in a room where at least six theatrical dressing tables bordered the walls, each with enough 100-watt bulbs around its mirror to light the Rockettes. It wasn’t hard to find Wendy. She was the only one who resembled a real human being. The rest all looked like Stripper Barbie.
Nobody said anything to me as I maneuvered my way past a rack of sequined G-strings and stood behind her. When her eyes met mine in the mirror, they reflected momentary bewilderment back to me, followed by fury and then fear. They stopped at the one she least deserved to feel.
“Nuh-uh, Wendy,” I said. “The shame stops here.”
The girl at the next dressing table twisted in her seat, a thick false eyelash poised on the tip of her finger like a tarantula. “You want me to get Van, Gio?” she said.
“No,” Wendy said. “It’s okay.”
She pushed back the metal folding chair and stood up and pulled me by the wrist to a space between the cement block wall and the costume rack. As if anything hanging there was big enough to conceal us or keep the entire room from hearing us. The place went eavesdropping-silent, which meant our conversation had to be an exchange of hisses.
“What are you doing here, Tara?”
“I came to get you out.”
“I’m getting out. I have to do tonight so I can get out clean. I don’t want to owe him anything.”
“You really think he’s going to let you go? Really?”
“You don’t get it.”
“That’s just it. I do get it. As long as you do this on his terms you’re just prolonging the shame. It has to end right now, for all of us.”
I didn’t know where the words were coming from and I didn’t try to stop them. Wendy wasn’t choking me with a thong, so I had to go with believing a space was opening up in there. I had to believe I could speak into her.
“You’re in a mess,” I said. “But it doesn’t define you. It’s not who you are. Those videos you make aren’t you either.”
“Maybe they are.” Wendy tried to harden her face, unsuccessfully. “Look, I didn’t grow up the way you did.”
“And Seth didn’t grow up the way you did. But that babysitter he told you about? She twisted him, and I know somebody twisted you.” I picked up her hand and squeezed it. “But you and Seth, you can’t let them win. You have to win. The true you.”
For a second or two, I thought she was there, the way she sought my face for something more than I was saying. She pressed my hand.
And then she pulled away and yanked the shades down on the trust in her eyes. “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do. I was twisting too. That’s why I know I can help you.”
“I don’t see how you can.” Her face wilted, but she lifted her chin, as if she were defying herself more than me. “No,” she said. “I can do this on my own. All I need is tonight.”
Perfect. Gray said she’d do this. She said this would be my chance, and my only chance, to get her out of here.
“How much are you going to make tonight?” I said. “What’s Van paying you? That’s his name, right?”
“Fifty dollars,” she said.
“That’s before tips,” said a voice with a ripe Alabama accent.
Enough shhhh’s ensued to cover a librarian for a year, but the same voice said, “You do at least another hundred extra, Gio, and you know it.”
Nobody bothered to hush her up that time. If I’d had enough time I would have gone out there and hugged her. Instead I dug into the pocket of my jacket and pulled out the rest of Gray’s cash.
“Here’s two hundred,” I said. “Now let’s get out of here.”
“I can’t take this.”
“Take it, Gio.”
The rack rolled away and three women in various stages of undress stood in front of us. They didn’t look so much like Barbie clones now. Although every one of them had on foundation they’d no doubt applied with a trowel and cleavage so deep you could hide a Chihuahua in it, each face wore a different expression of envy and urgency and dusty hope.
“Do it, Gio,” Alabama said. “You know you want to.”
She bobbed her head at the others, her face young and earnest under the hard mask. They joined her with, “Go . . . we’ll cover for you . . . really, get out.”
Alabama grabbed Wendy’s gigantic canvas bag from the floor and shoved it into her arms. “Just stay as far away from here as you can.”
I bit back all the rest of the things I wanted to say. It was up to Wendy now. I closed my eyes and tried to pray, but all that came to mind was, God, step in.
“Okay,” Wendy said. “Y’all—”
“You don’t have time for good-byes,” Alabama said. “Go.”
One of them had already opened the metal door that led to the alley. I pushed Wendy out ahead of me, and when I got to the threshold I turned back to Alabama.
“I hope you can all get out,” I said.
“Shut that door!” someone hissed.
“Go!” Alabama gave me a shove and tried to pull the door shut but a harsh voice behind her stopped us both.
“Where’s Gio? Get the—Move! Where is she?”
I didn’t even have to see the obnoxious collar to know it was Van. As the lacerating voice cut across my back, I knew why Wendy was giving him one more night.
And then there would be another, and another, until she was slashed to nothing.
I turned and stumbled out to the landing, screaming, “Run, Wendy! Go to Lexi’s!” With another twirl I threw my side against the door as it swung toward closing and still I cried, “Don’t stand there, Wendy! Go!”
But she didn’t move from the bottom of the steps, and the door came open and slammed me against the railing. The face between the upturned collar came at me like a mask of raging no-color eyes and flaring nostrils and a cruel mouth that spit words between his too-white teeth.
He was so close I could see the blood vessels that mapped those eyes—those eyes that told me I was about to be bent backwards over the alley. Already my kidneys were crying out as my back pressed the bars.
“Where is Gio?” The heels of his hands hit my shoulders and I cried out and braced for the second blow. “Where the—”
The most profane word of the night was jolted out of him as hands yanked him back by that wretched collar, pulling half the shirt off with them. Gray’s cheek pressed against his.
“Touch her again and you’ll go right down those steps on your face.” Gray bugged her eyes at me. “Tara—go!”
I tried. I even got to the first step. But the element of surprise Gray had on her side evaporated quickly and Van jerked from her grasp and came at me again. I tottered backward and felt myself falling with nothing to grab but air. I thought I screamed.
But the guttural cry came from Wendy. I never knew whether that was before or after I fell against her and drove both of us to the bricks. Everything happened in such a chaos of violence both verbal and visceral I was hard put to understand it even as it went down.
Wendy pushed me off of her, and from my paralyzed vantage point on the ground I watched her fling herself straight at Van and dig her fingernails in
to his chest.
“Don’t! You! Touch! Her!” she screamed into his face. “You want to hit somebody, you hit me.”
The momentary shock left his eyes and he closed both of her hands into his fists. “Not a problem . . . I’ll beat the . . .”
His face blackened as he disgorged curses like projectile vomit. He transferred Wendy’s hands to one of his and lifted her from the ground. Dear God, he was going to throw her. I did scream then, and Van flicked his now maddened gaze at me. Gray reappeared behind him and tried to wrap her arms around his chest, but he pulled up his free elbow and brought it back straight into her belly. She moaned and fell to the bottom step. Wendy was able to wrench her hands from his and she tried to run to me, tried to reach down, but he got her by the back of the hair.
I somehow got to my feet screaming “No!” from a place in me I didn’t know existed. I was within inches of his heinous face with my claws bared when I was shoved sideways and fell to the sidewalk again. Wendy came down beside me and she pawed at me and clung to my clothes like a drowning child.
Someone stepped over us—a figure wider and taller than Van. When I was able to pull away from Wendy, I saw that he had Van by both shoulders and in one muscular heave threw him into the wall and held him there with his forearm across Van’s throat.
“You want to hit somebody, pal,” Ike said, “you hit me. Go on.” He pushed Van harder against the bricks. “What’s wrong? You can only hit women?”
Van, of course, didn’t answer because his air supply was being cut off.
“Tara,” Ike said, not taking his eyes from the spluttering face in front of him, “get your cell phone out of my pocket and call 9-1-1.”
“Done,” Gray said from the bottom step. “Savannah’s finest should be here any minute.”
Wendy had by then turned to jelly in my lap, and I was not far from that myself. Until a pair of small arms came around us both and Lexi said, “I told y’all to be careful.”
“Damage assessment,” Ike said, still immobilizing Van. I was actually relieved to see that the man was breathing.
“Tara, you okay?” Ike said. “Physically, I mean?”
I was actually too shaken to know if I was or not, so I said, “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Wendy?”
She nodded against my chest.
“That’s a yes,” I said.
“Gray?”
“I think he probably broke a rib. Which is fine by me. That’ll look good on his rap sheet.”
A siren split the night and blue lights designed to blind perpetrators before they ever got to jail flashed all over the alley. Then it really did get confusing.
In the midst of strobe-lit images and rapid-fire questions and a stew of sweat and spit and tears, Van was handcuffed and we were interviewed and he was arrested for assault and Ike was cleared of any wrongdoing and Wendy, Gray, and I were pretty much ordered to go to the ER.
“You’re going to need all the evidence you can get,” one officer told us after his partner had deposited Van into the back of the cruiser. “This is simple assault. He’ll be out on bail by morning, probably, and he won’t get much jail time if he’s convicted.”
With a grimace he turned to go, but Wendy pulled her hand from mine, which she’d been wringing out for the last half hour, and said, “Wait.”
He paused. “Was there something else?”
“Yes.” Wendy pointed to the back door, which, now that I thought about it, had not opened since Gray came through. How scared were those poor women?
“There’s a girl in there, one of the exotic dancers,” Wendy said. “She’s only sixteen.”
“Are you serious?”
“She’s a runaway and she goes by Arwen, but her real name’s Taylor.”
The officer nodded toward the cruiser where Van glared through the window, still cursing us all.
“He know how old she is?” the officer said.
“Oh yeah,” Wendy said. “He knows.”
“Okay.” I heard a smattering of satisfaction in his voice. “Will you come by the station in the morning and make a statement?”
“No doubt,” Wendy said.
We all watched in silence as the cruiser pulled away. It felt almost reverent, that silence, as if we were watching evil being driven into the darkness.
Ike was the first to break it. “I guess I need to escort you ladies to the ER. And then, for Pete’s sake, can we eat?” He dropped a grin on us. “Nothing like a good fight to work up your appetite.”
“You’re an animal,” Gray said.
But I found myself grinning back.
TWENTY-SEVEN
My dinner date with Ike turned out to be breakfast for all five of us at the Waffle House after the ER visit. Fortunately it was a slow night at the hospital, so it only took two hours to find out Wendy and I were going to be bruised and achy the next day and Gray had not one but two broken ribs. She seemed pretty proud of them.
By the time we finished doing a respectable job with a table full of waffles and potatoes done every way you could have them, it was two a.m. I was going on my third night without sleep, and I could hardly wipe the syrup off my mouth.
Ike narrowed his eyes first at Wendy and then at me. “I don’t want to see either one of you in my coffee shop today. Are we clear?”
I nodded. Wendy stared into her lap.
“What’s up?” Gray said to her.
Wendy shook her head, but I knew, and so did Lexi.
“You’re coming to my place, right?” Lexi said.
Gray shook her ponytail. “Not without a police escort.”
“I’ll walk you in,” Ike said. “But Gray has a point. Once Mr.—what the heck’s his name anyway?”
“I forget,” Wendy said.
I loved that.
“Once he’s out on bail,” Ike said, “it’s not safe for either one of you to be there.”
“Can we figure that out later?” Lexi said. “I’m brain-dead.”
So we sorted it through that we would take Lexi and Wendy to Lexi’s place while Gray went home, and then Ike would take me home. By the time it was just the two of us in his Tahoe, I should have been brain-dead, too, but my mind was still churning.
“Can I run something past you?” I said as he maneuvered the SUV around Monterey Square.
“Absolutely.”
“When I was talking to Wendy in the dressing room—or undressing room, I guess you’d call it—”
“Good one.”
“Stuff was coming out of my mouth that I didn’t even know I thought. Have you ever had that happen?”
“Not sure. Like what?”
“I told her that the mistakes she made, having that job and . . . some other things. I said that didn’t define her.”
“Sounds right to me.”
“So doesn’t the same thing apply to Seth? I know what probably made him susceptible to porn now and, I mean, I don’t excuse what he’s done. But I understand it. I just don’t think that’s all he is.”
Ike didn’t answer. Maybe that was okay. Hearing it come out of my mouth again, I knew it was true.
When we pulled up to the curb on Gaston Street, he told me to wait until he opened the door for me and then he was going to walk me up to the house. I was pretty sure no one had ever done that for me. Except maybe Seth on prom night, because Paul told him he ought to. It was the downside of growing up together.
Ike still hadn’t said anything else when we got to the porch.
“I don’t even know how to start thanking you,” I said. “I know it wasn’t the evening you had in mind, but you probably saved Wendy’s life.”
He smiled faintly from under the brim of his hat. Then something dawned on me.
“How did you know how to find us?” I said.
“Because you left a trail of bread crumbs.” He pulled my phone out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You left it on the table.”
He frowned at me.
“I know,” I sai
d. “Stupid.”
“So I looked up your last call and phoned it and—what’s her name?”
“Lexi.”
“She got me to the back door of the club. And there you were.” Ike pushed back the fedora with the inevitable index finger. “You’re killin’ me, Tara. You’re killin’ me.”
I leaned against the iron railing. “I don’t think that kind of thing will be happening again. We’ll figure out a way to get Wendy and Lexi out of that apartment, and I’ll go with Wendy to the police station and then . . .” I let out a long sigh. “Then I think that’s the last of the layers of this whole thing. No more secrets. No more shame. We’re done.”
Ike just looked at me. I couldn’t read what was in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was kind of a rant.”
Ike motioned for me to move over and leaned on the railing next to me, arms folded. “All right, I want to say a couple of things . . . if I get to have a turn.”
“Stop it.”
I felt him grin.
“One. I think you’re right about one mistake or one issue not defining a person, although I still say you’re too good for him.”
He gave me a look from the corner of his eye.
“Two?” I said.
“Two, if it doesn’t define Wendy and it doesn’t define Seth, I gotta tell ya, from where I’m standing, it doesn’t define you either.”
I stared at the side of his face. He had a wise profile that made me want to believe him.
“Three . . . can you handle three?”
“I’m still working on two,” I said. “But go on.”
“Three,” he said again.
He stared off in front of us, although at what I couldn’t know. I got the sense he was looking more in than out.
“You were right about something else,” he said finally.
“Okay,” I said.
“When you said the woman I was waiting for just might walk through the doors of the Piebald, you were spot on. She did.”
I held my breath. I didn’t want to let any words slip out before I thought them through this time.
Ike pulled away from the railing and stood in front of me, hands in his pockets, head tilted. “You’ve been beaten up pretty good and I know you aren’t ready for a relationship. But I don’t see me looking at anybody else who comes through those doors, so if and when . . . I’ll be here. Until then, no pressure.” He lifted his chin at me. “We good?”
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