Women of the Mean Streets

by J. M. Redmann

  She noticed something eerie, too. The more Dimitri obsessed over Athena, the more the other girls he brought in started to look like her. Soon the whole stable was made up of all brunettes, curvy and tall, with long hair and big eyes. Some women were forced to get surgery, breast implants or nose jobs, but even then they didn’t escape, she said. No doubt, Dimitri had doctors and surgeons in his pocket or on his client list.

  “Once a woman’s spirit is broken, she’ll never leave. You can leave the door open and car running and she’ll stay there at the house. It’s how it is, usually.”

  I was stunned by the story. It was so outrageous, but my gut said to believe her. Which made me sad for this woman in front of me, spending maybe ten years as a sexual hostage, a battered woman cut off from everything in her life.

  “So, New Orleans—”

  She cut me off. “I was on the job. I was there with three newer girls, all of us looking for clients. Our chaperone was busy watching the new girls since I’m trusted, well, was trusted by Dimitri. I’ve been his head bitch for almost a decade now.”

  Shit. A decade of turning tricks. This is not the kind of broad you take home to mother, but still I wanted her with my whole being. I don’t care how many men she had to sleep with, I know what I felt was real.

  “Was I a mark, then? Or was it real? I knew we had something. Or are you really a good actress?” I vacillated between anger and compassion.

  “You were a surprise, a wonderful, wonderful surprise,” she repeated again, cracking the first smile I had seen from all night. “I’ve never tricked a woman alone, but I just felt you looking at me and really seeing the real me. I thought maybe we’d have fun, and I’d get some cash and that’d be it. But after that first night I knew I could never go back to Dimitri. So I stayed with you as long as I could, then I took your wallet and phone and just ran.”

  “The girls that were with you, did they know?”

  “No, as far as they knew I was with a john. Then when I got to Portland, I called the only number I had—Sarah Martin, of the girls who used to be in the stable, used to be called Artemis—we all were given Greek names. Anyway, her parents got her out with some expert who retrieves people in cults. She left me their phone number and I kept it with me all the time, just in case. She helped me get in touch with a battered women’s underground network here and I’ve been hiding here since then.”

  Sarah Martin was one of the dead girls in Portland. Athena didn’t know this yet, didn’t know about the murdered women from the truck stops or the Pussy Palladium either. I pulled out the photos I had, every vic except the last, and watched her break down in loud squalls. They were all Stoli girls, all forced to prostitute in exchange for living. If you could call what they were doing “living.”

  After she calmed herself, Athena looked perplexed. “If he’s killed five girls, and I’m gone, there’s only two more girls left in the stable. Why would he…is he killing off the whole stable? Or replacing us? I don’t understand.”

  I didn’t have the answers. It baffled me, too. But I wasn’t nearly as afraid of Dimitri as she was. He hadn’t broken my spirit, and I desperately wanted to nail the bastard. It was suddenly about more than just Athena. “Athena, I need you to trust me. I need to call a friend.”

  *

  Karen was as flummoxed by Athena’s story as I was. She knew Dimitri, had caught a case where he had beaten and raped a fourteen-year-old. When the girl moved out of town and refused to testify, no doubt too terrified to do so, the DA dropped the charges. Karen was still bitter about the dismissal, in part because she had been the first person to talk with the girl and still remembered the haunted look in her blackened eyes.

  Athena told Karen everything she could about the last ten years, the people, places, the women who had gone missing from the stable house. Often she only remembered the pseudonyms that Dimitri had assigned them—Delia, Xena, Zoey, Aphrodite, Alexa, Tianna. Karen showed her the photos of the dead women, to identify them as well. But when she got to the last one, the girl at Pussy Palladium, Athena blanched. Ashen-faced, she began to sob, saying, “No, no, no,” over and over again.

  I put my arm around her, and she melted into my shoulder, sobbing for what seemed an eternity. Finally she spoke: “That’s my sister. My real sister. I don’t know how he got her, but I’d recognize her anywhere.”

  “Are you sure?” Karen pressed. “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen her. Couldn’t this be another girl with plastic surgery to look like you?”

  “No. I’d know,” Athena paused, briefly giving in to hope. “Well, maybe. But I don’t think so. Please, can I see her?”

  *

  Athena and I spent the next two weeks holed up in my room at the hotel. We spent most of our time fucking, re-enacting those few crazy wonderful days in New Orleans. Any time I tried to get her to talk seriously, she’d pull me back into bed, wrap her gloriously long legs around me, and put her mouth someplace—any place—that made me forget my own name, much less anything else that was even less fundamental to my life.

  “Where do you want to go? You know, when this is all done?” I nudged Athena to talk about our future, to make plans for how we’d mesh our lives now that we’d been through so much.

  “I don’t know, babe. We’ll see.” I gleaned that “we’ll see” was somewhat of a motto for Athena, a live-in-the-moment ethos that had gotten her through a decade of hell. In mere days I had mastered the art of patience, learning never to push too hard for answers that Athena simply wasn’t prepared to offer up. I had a house in Brooklyn, a girlfriend in Portland, and a career in need of a cash infusion. But as long as I had Athena, I could go anywhere that made her happy.

  “Maybe the beach somewhere. Or a nice little house in the country where we could settle down. You could go back to your real name even. Nobody would ever know anything about your background.” I offered up ideas because I couldn’t stop coming up with them.

  She pulled me close again, the hips and curves and angles closing in on me, and whispered into my ear before she bit it gently. “We’ll see.”

  *

  Arresting Dimitri Chekov was easier for Karen Wakefield and her colleagues than anyone ever expected. Athena, whose real name, it turned out, was Jennifer Jessup, gave her so much information she was able to get someone to infiltrate the perv’s inner circle.

  While Athena and I were canoodling across town, their sting operation had moved along swiftly, and before we even realized they had acted, I got a call from Karen.

  “We nailed him,” she said triumphantly. We had been in bed snuggling all morning when I got the call. I relayed the news and Athena beamed. “Want to come down to the station so I can tell you all the gory details?”

  Looking between the cell and Athena made the decision even harder, but I’d set this whole thing in motion, I wanted to thank Karen in person for following it through. The best part of it all was that now Athena and I could be together, no Dimitri, no sex work, no obstacles to our love. I wanted to grab her and run off to Casablanca—or wherever private dicks and lady vamps now ran off to. Instead I threw on a Steelers cap, a henley shirt, and a clean pair of jeans; an off-duty outfit that Karen no doubt had seen before.

  “Want to go with me?” I pointed at Athena, though I already knew the answer.

  Athena shook her head, smiling seductively. She was staying put. No doubt that meant I would be rushing back to bed as soon as earthly possible.

  *

  Karen Wakefield was a brassy broad, but she was built like a brick shithouse. She was no doubt the sexiest criminal investigator I’ve ever seen. Even though she sported a button-down oxford shirt with one too many buttons undone to be considered workplace-friendly, I was able to ignore her advances because I had a goddess at home. Well, in my hotel room bed, that is. Soon she’d be at home with me. Wherever home was these days. We still hadn’t talked about the next step, both of us so focused on getting her out of Dimitri’s grasp we’d failed to d
iscuss much of anything beyond that. We did find time to make love, of course.

  Now I was so wrapped up thinking about the road ahead and having more sex that I almost missed Karen’s triumphant spiel.

  “Hey, you there?” Karen snapped—her voice and her fingers—in my direction.

  “Yeah, sorry, my mind is multitasking apparently,” I admitted, trying to look sheepish. “Tell me what’s up.”

  “First, the good news. The girl in the morgue—it’s not Athena’s sister. It’s Candace Marshall, a seventeen-year-old from Boise. She just went missing a month and a half ago from Lloyd Center Mall; apparently an ice skater, was there for some sort of competition.” Portland’s beloved Lloyd Center offered one of the few ice skating rinks in the Northwest. Tanya Harding, the disgraced former champion skater, grew up skating laps there. I couldn’t imagine a safer place to send your kid.

  “Did she look like that when she was abducted?” I remember how unnerved I was looking into that Dumpster, the resemblance to Athena so uncanny.

  Karen shook her head. “This one wasn’t even a natural brunette. Her eyes were already similar but the ME said she’d had lots of injectable fillers in her face, lip augmentation, cheek implants, a nose job.”

  “You said she’d only been missing six weeks.” It was a statement, but I said it as though there was a question mark at the end. “How…”

  Karen interjected. “Yeah, I know, it’s fucking crazy. The ME says the surgeries happened the first week she was missing. Another disgusting tidbit: All the murdered women had botulism toxin in their jaws and throats.”

  I stared blankly, trying to grasp what that meant.

  “Oh…Botox injections in their jaws.” I began to understand. Forced Botox in the jaw as a precurser to other forced things in the mouth. “Gross.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed.

  After we serpentined our way to a small hazy room in the back of the station, Karen swore me to secrecy.

  “Pinky swear, boss,” I said, which made us both smile.

  Karen hit Play on small silver DVD player and suddenly I was seeing Dimitri Chekov for the first time. He was fresh-faced, not unattractive, faintly familiar, and he looked about fifteen years younger than I knew he had to be. Perhaps having a stable of women doing all the work for you keeps a pimp young. If I passed him on the street, I’d probably mistake him for the Olympic ice skater from Russia, Evgeni Plushenko. I wonder if that’s what Candace Marshall saw, too.

  It wasn’t Citizen Kane, but the slightly grainy video captured Dimitri’s seduction techniques. In this case, that involved simply offering wine coolers and weed to an undercover cop who looked all of fourteen. She also captured his wrath when she tried to get away from the bastard. In short order, the undercover girl, er, woman, started to plead: “I gotta go home, my mom will get worried.” She looked genuinely panicked. I’m betting that although she was wired and had ample backup, the undercover was as terrified as Athena or Candace or all those girls who Dimitri seduced and turned out with beatings in between.

  Karen cut off the video, but the impact was clear.

  “We got him dead to rights,” she said. “They’re arraigning him today on multiple charges of kidnapping, child sex trafficking, forcible rape, sexual assault, fraud, and murder two. It’s enough to keep him in prison for many lifetimes.”

  I was so relieved, I think I actually exhaled audibly when she finished the list of charges.

  Turned out the flophouse where he was keeping the two remaining women from his stable was rife with DNA evidence linking him to crimes in California, Texas, Arizona, and three other states—crimes the cops hadn’t even known about. The women were mute at first, but once they realized Dimitri and his muscle men were going away for a long, long time, the women opened up about the treatment they had undergone. They also explained what the last few months, after Athena had escaped, had been like.

  “Both of the women—well, girls, really, because the two still alive were both still teenagers—but both of them had been attacked with regularity in the last month. Punched, kicked, choked. They said Dimitri was increasingly paranoid, so they were chained up a lot more than they had been before Athena escaped. He also became obsessed with finding Athena and with replacing her.”

  “Did they both look like Athena, too?”

  “No,” Karen said. “One was a blonde, actually, but they both had had lip injections, so we’re thinking he just had yet to get to them.”

  What I didn’t understand still was why there were dead women in multiple states, why they had been killed, even why Dimitri was forcing surgery on some women but not others. Karen seemed to read my mind.

  “The DA still has to try the case, and if for some reason he’s acquitted, your friend Wyatt is ready to extradite the bastard,” she said. “But Dimitri is already trying to cut a deal, offering up bigger perverts in the slave trade. DA’s not going to deal, but they’re milking it. Seems that Dimitri was tracking Athena the way you were, and he blamed girls who had been at the club with her. He’d hit a city, torture one for information on where exactly she was, and when that failed—because they didn’t actually know anything—he killed her as a lesson to the others. When he got to Portland, it was fairly easy to track down Sarah Martin, who actually did know something, but apparently even though he tortured her for hours, she never gave up where Athena was.”

  But Candace Marshall didn’t even know Athena. “Did Candace Marshall, Aphrodite, did she try to escape? Is that why she was killed?”

  “No, he had her working at the club with a bodyguard to diversify. But by the time Candace was scooped up, Dimitri had already spiraled out of control, and she was just killed for not being Athena. He had clearly devolved so much at the end, I won’t be surprised if his attorney files for an diminished capacity defense.”

  “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen,” I said.

  Diminished capacity, insanity defense aside, no doubt, Dimitri and his cronies were going away for a very long time, which made both of us very, very happy.

  *

  I couldn’t wait to tell Athena about all of it: the arrests, the rescued girls, that she could start planning that family reunion with her mother and sister. Best of all, the future we could have now without having to look over our shoulders, without having to run from city to city.

  I drove back to the hotel, so flush with excitement that I was singing along to a song on the radio, something I hadn’t done since my teens. I was a woman in love, a woman who was finally free to be with the woman I loved, the woman I fought for and rescued. I was a chivalrous champion of good over evil and I was going to walk up one flight of stairs to my gorgeous reward.

  There was no pot of gold at the end of my rainbow, though. The room was silent and nearly empty, save a handwritten note on the bed. I started to tremble, tearing up before I even read the damn thing.

  Dear Parker,

  I know you won’t believe this, but honestly, you never were a mark. You were my lovely surprise not just because I enjoyed fucking you—something I didn’t think I could do ever again—but because you saved me from Dimitri. You will always be my knight in shining armor and for that I’ll be eternally grateful. But I’m not the girl you want me to be, either. I will never be happy on a beach or in a little farmhouse or even in your Brooklyn flat. I’m not your girlfriend, I’m definitely not wife material. I’ll never be kept again—by man or woman. Please don’t follow me this time. But do know you’ll always have a place in my heart.

  Always, Athena.

  Too bad I had my wallet and cell phone with me this time.

  Lucky Thirteen

  Anne Laughlin

  Sara was nearly out the door of her office when the phone rang. She didn’t want to answer it. Desperately did not want to answer it. The day had been full of property showings to disinterested buyers, listing appointments with angry sellers. The collapse of the real estate market had taken almost every bit of fun out of the business. It had a
lso taken away a lot of her income. She had to pick up the call.

  “Crane Realty. This is Sara.”

  “Sara, my name is Tammy Sanders. I’m a friend of a friend of past clients of yours?”

  That’s better, thought Sara. Referrals from past clients were the best kind of business to have. Maybe something good would come of the day after all.

  “Wonderful,” Sara said. “Which clients were they?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know them. Our mutual friend gave me your name.”

  Sara sat at her desk and pulled a pad toward her. “The important thing is they referred you. Tell me what I can do for you.”

  “I’m moving to town soon and wanted to start looking at some houses. I’m not giving you any notice, I’m afraid. I’ll be in town for the day tomorrow, but back for a longer stay next weekend.”

  Sara fought the exhaustion falling over her. She’d have to scramble to put a schedule together. What she wanted was a bath and her book. If she were being honest, what she wanted was a bath, a book, and a drink. But everyone seemed to say that the drink wasn’t an option for her anymore, and most of the time she agreed. Just not all of the time.

  “That is short notice, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I totally understand. There’s only one property I’d like to try to see tomorrow. I saw it online and it looks perfect. We can do more when I return next week.”

  At least she’s reasonable, Sara thought. She woke her computer and logged on to the MLS.

  “That shouldn’t be a problem. What’s the address?”

  The address Tammy gave her was a property just outside town. Sara scanned the listing sheet and saw that it sat on a five-acre lot. The photo showed an old and run-down house, but the price was attractive.

  “Looks like it’s on a beautiful piece of land, very isolated,” Sara said.