Kelly looked away, not knowing what he was supposed to say. The pleasure was all mine? Part of him still believed that he was taking advantage of her. He'd stumbled upon a troubled girl and ... exploited her? No, that wasn't true. He loved her. Amazing as that seemed. His life was changing into something recognizably normal--probably. He was healing her, but she was healing him as well.
"She's--she's worried that I won't--the stuff in her past, I mean. I really don't care much about that. You're right, she's a very strong girl. Hell, I have a somewhat checkered past, too, y'know? I ain't no priest, guys."
"Let her talk it out," Sam said. "She needs that. You have to let things in the open before you start dealing with them."
"You're sure it won't affect you? It might be some pretty ugly stuff," Sarah observed, watching his eyes.
"Uglier than war?" Kelly shook his head. Then he changed the subject. "What about the ... medications?"
The question relieved everyone, and Sarah was talking work again. "She's been through the most crucial period. If there were going to be a serious withdrawal reaction, it would have happened already. She may still have periods of agitation, brought on by external stress, for example. In that case you have the phenobarb, and I've already written out instructions for you, but she's gutting it out. Her personality is far stronger than she appreciates. You're smart enough to see if she's having a bad time. If so, make her--make her--take one of the tablets."
The idea of forcing her to do anything bridled Kelly. "Look, doc, I can't--"
"Shut up, John. I don't mean jamming it down her throat. If you tell her that she really needs it, she's going to listen to you, okay?"
"How long?"
"For another week, maybe ten days," Sarah said after a moment's reflection.
"And then?"
"Then you can think about the future you two might have together," Sarah told him.
Sam felt uneasy getting this personal. "I want her fully checked out, Kelly. When's the next time you're due into Baltimore?"
"A couple of weeks, maybe sooner. Why?"
Sarah handled that: "I wasn't able to do a very thorough exam. She hasn't seen a physician in a long time, and I'll feel better if she has a CPX--complete history and physical. Who do you think, Sam?"
"You know Madge North?"
"She'll do," Sarah thought. "You know, Kelly, it wouldn't hurt for you to get checked out, too."
"Do I look sick?" Kelly held his arms out, allowing them to survey the magnificence of his body.
"Don't give me that crap," Sarah snapped back. "When she shows up, you show up. I want to make sure you're both completely healthy--period. Got it?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"One more thing, and I want you to hear me through," Sarah went on. "She needs to see a psychiatrist."
"Why?"
"John, life isn't a movie. People don't put their problems behind and ride into a sunset in real life, okay? She's been sexually abused. She's been on drugs. Her self-esteem isn't very high right now. People in her position blame themselves for being victims. The right kind of therapy can help to fix that. What you're doing is important, but she needs professional help, too. Okay?"
Kelly nodded. "Okay."
"Good," Sarah said, looking up at him. "I like you. You listen well."
"Do I have a choice, ma'am?" Kelly inquired with a twisted grin.
She laughed. "No, not really."
"She's always this pushy," Sam told Kelly. "She really ought to be a nurse. Docs are supposed to be more civilized. Nurses are the ones who push us around." Sarah kicked her husband playfully.
"Then I better never run into a nurse," Kelly said, leading them back off the dock.
Pam ended up sleeping just over ten hours, and without benefit of barbiturates, though she did awaken with a crushing headache which Kelly treated with aspirin.
"Get Tylenol," Sarah told him. "Easier on the stomach." The pharmacologist made a show of checking Pam again while Sam packed up their gear. On the whole she liked what she saw. "I want you to gain five pounds before I see you again."
"But--"
"And John's going to bring you in to see us so that we can get you completely checked out--two weeks, say?"
"Yes, ma'am." Kelly nodded surrender again.
"But--"
"Pam, they ganged up on me. I have to go in, too," Kelly reported in a remarkably docile voice.
"You have to leave so early?"
Sarah nodded. "We really should have left last night, but what the hell." She looked at Kelly. "If you don't show up like I said, I'll call you and scream."
"Sarah. Jesus, you're a pushy broad!"
"You should hear what Sam says."
Kelly walked her out to the dock, where Sam's boat was already rumbling with life. She and Pam hugged. Kelly tried just to shake hands, but had to submit to a kiss. Sam jumped down to shake their hands.
"New charts!" Kelly told the surgeon.
"Aye, Cap'n."
"I'll get the lines."
Rosen was anxious to show him what he'd learned. He backed out, drawing mainly on his starboard shaft and turning his Hatteras within her own length. The man didn't forget. A moment later Sam increased power on both engines and drove straight out, heading directly for water he knew to be deep. Pam just stood there, holding Kelly's hand, until the boat was a white speck on the horizon.
"I forgot to thank her," Pam said finally.
"No, you didn't. You just didn't say it, that's all. So how are you today?"
"My headache's gone." She looked up at him. Her hair needed washing, but her eyes were clear and there was a spring in her step. Kelly felt the need to kiss her, which he did. "So what do we do now?"
"We need to talk," Pam said quietly. "It's time."
"Wait here." Kelly went back into the shop and returned with a pair of folding lounge chairs. He gestured her into one. "Now tell me how terrible you are."
Pamela Starr Madden was three weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday, Kelly learned, finally discovering her surname as well. Born to a lower-working-class family in the Panhandle region of northern Texas, she'd grown up under the firm hand of a father who was the sort of man to make a Baptist minister despair. Donald Madden was a man who understood the form of religion, but not the substance, who was strict because he didn't know how to love, who drank from frustration with life--and was angry at himself for that, too--yet never managed to come to terms with it. When his children misbehaved, he beat them, usually with a belt or a switch of wood until his conscience kicked in, something which did not always happen sooner than fatigue. The final straw for Pam, never a happy child, had come on the day after her sixteenth birthday, when she'd stayed late at a church function and ended up going on what was almost a date with friends, feeling that she finally had the right to do so. There hadn't even been a kiss at the end of it from the boy whose household was almost as restrictive as her own. But that hadn't mattered to Donald Madden. Arriving home at ten-twenty on a Friday evening, Pam came into a house whose lights blazed with anger, there to face an enraged father and a thoroughly cowed mother.
"The things he said ... " Pam was looking down at the grass as she spoke. "I didn't do any of that. I didn't even think of doing it, and Albert was so innocent ... but so was I, then."
Kelly squeezed her hand. "You don't have to tell me any of this, Pam." But she did have to, and Kelly knew that, and so he continued to listen.
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 hetp--and not trusting the social services which might have helped her along a different path, she finally found herself in Washington, D.C., 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'd 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 sent 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. You 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.
"Put your fingers in your ears," Kelly told her.
"Why?"
"Please," he replied. When she did, Kelly's right hand moved in a blur, pulling a 45 Colt automatic from under his shirt. He brought it up into a two-hand hold, going left to right. One at a time, perhaps half a second apart, the cans alternatively fell over or flew a foot or two in the air to the crashing report of the pistol. Before the last was back on the ground from its brief flight, Kelly had ejected the spent magazine and was inserting another, and seven of the cans moved a little more. He checked to be s
ure the weapon was clear, dropped the hammer, and replaced it in his belt before sitting down next to her.
"It doesn't take all that much to be scary to a young girl without friends. It takes a little more to scare me. Pam, if anybody even thinks about hurting you, he has to talk to me first."
She looked over at the cans, then up at Kelly, who was pleased with himself and his marksmanship. The demonstration had been a useful release for him, and in the brief flurry of activity, he'd assigned a name or a face to each of the cans. But he could see she still was not convinced. It Would take a little time.
"Anyway." He sat down with Pam again. "Okay, you told me your story, right?"
"Yes."
"Do you still think it makes a difference to me?"
"No. You say it doesn't. I guess I believe you."
"Pam, not all the men in the world are like that--not very many, as a matter of fact. You've been unlucky, that's all. There isn't anything wrong with you. Some people get hurt in accidents or get sick. Over in Vietnam I saw men get killed from bad luck. It almost happened to me. It wasn't because there was something wrong with them. It was just bad luck, being in the wrong place, turning left instead of right, looking the wrong way. Sarah wants you to meet some docs and talk it through. I think she's right. We're going to get you all fixed up."
"And then?" Pam Madden asked. He took a very deep breath, but it was too late to stop now.
"Will you . . . stay with me, Pam?"
She looked as though she'd been slapped. Kelly was stunned by her reaction. "You can't, you're just doing it because--"
Kelly stood and lifted her by the arms. "Listen to me, okay? You've been sick. You're getting better. You've taken everything that goddamned world could toss at you, and you didn't quit. I believe in you! It's going to take time. Everything does. But at the end of it, you will be one goddamned fine person." He set her down on her feet and stepped back. He was shaking with rage, not only at what had happened to her, but at himself for starting to impose his will on her. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. Please, Pam ... just believe in yourself a little."
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