Paradise Burning Read online

  “And when your husband wonders where the college fund came from?”

  Jade blanched. “Even if he kills me,” she vowed, “my kids are going to college.”

  “Guess you think you’re one of them martyrs, huh?” Delilah taunted. “Well, let me tell you, girl, you had it all. I mean, all. And you blew it. Your ma tell you to go with men? I don’t guess she did ‘cuz that’d ruin her plans. She jes’ wanted you t’be famous and have lots of money. Maybe get a job as an actress or marry some rich guy who thinks he deserves one o’ them trophy wives. Well, shit, girl, what’s wrong with that? I was the oldest of five, and my ma had me out on the streets ‘helpin’ out’ by the time I was twelve. And like I already said, a girl can’t read, what else she gon’ do? So I stuck all those johns who like ‘em young for everythin’ I c’d git. I scored crack and pills to keep goin’, gave the cops freebies so’s they’d go chase someone mo’ a danger to so-ci-e-ty than me.”

  Fists clenched in her lap, Delilah glared at Jade. While she talked, she had leaned forward in her chair, almost as low as a jockey coming down the homestretch. Now, she subsided back into the upholstery, suddenly all too aware of the silence around her.

  “I’m sorry,” Peter mumbled as Mandy burst out, “Your local librarian can find somebody to help you learn to read.”

  “Ain’t no way.” Delilah shook her head. “School tried, they surely did. Warn’t their fault. I’m jes’ dumb. And now with all the drugs I’ve took . . . Ain’t possible. It truly ain’t.”

  “Your problem could be dyslexia,” Peter said, “and the experts know a lot more about how to deal with it than they used to. If you’ll allow me, I’d like to put you in touch with someone who might be able to help. Nobody should have to go through life not being able to read.”

  Delilah pulled at the hem of the lime green spandex, which kept sliding up to six inches above her knees. “I know you tryin’ to help, but everybody say I hopeless. You jes’ wastin’ yo’ time.”

  “You shut your black mouth and listen, girl,” Jade spat out. “They’re offering you a chance. Are you bullshitting us with that ‘I can’t read’ crap? If so, just get back out there and see how many tricks you can turn between now and tomorrow morning. But if you want to maybe join the human race, listen to these people and do what they say. What’ve you got to lose?”

  “Don’t know what I’m doin’ here with all these know-it-alls,” Delilah muttered, grumbling loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “You think about it, Delilah,” Peter advised, handing her his business card. “You want to learn to read, you call me. No strings.”

  “Can you get by on the street with straight sex?” Mandy asked, deliberately switching the subject.

  Delilah pursed her blood red lips, cocked her dark head to one side. “Well . . .,” she said, “for what I kin charge on the street I have to turn a lot of tricks to keep from starvin’. Mostly, there’s not time for more’n a quick head job, but sometimes—if a john wants something special—he’ll pay for a room and extra time. I kind of get off on the domination stuff. Whips, spankin’, jes’ plain yellin’—tellin’ them how bad they is—I do that real well. Kinda fun to make the johns suffer. I don’t even mind playin’ baby, for the guys who like ‘em young, but Golden Shower, rim jobs, ice cubes—that kinda stuff—if I know that’s what a guy wants, I send him to this other ho who’s so weird she actually likes it.” The black teenager shot a quick look at Mandy. “Uh, sorry, lady, but you asked.”

  “I appreciate your being so candid, uh–truthful,” Mandy replied steadily, wondering if there were such a thing as a hooker’s dictionary.

  Peter gave himself an inward sigh of relief as he realized Mandy hadn’t quite gotten all that. “What about you, Fawn?” he asked the delicate dancer. “Would you mind telling us how you feel about dancing at a topless bar?”

  Fawn spoke so softly they all had to strain to hear her. “You said you wanted to know about being forced. Well, when Max took me on was the happiest day of my life. I was so glad I cried. So my dancin’s got nothing to do with being forced.”

  “Max is the owner?” Peter asked. “And he treats you well?”

  “Yeah, he’s the best. He makes sure the bouncers don’t let no one touch me. You know, Look But Don’t Touch. He’s got signs that say that all over the walls. I just have to go out there and dance. I got different costumes, so I can do a little stripping first, but mostly I just dance. And I get paid for it, and I get to keep my tips, ’cept for what I give Dave and Steve and Eddie. Those’re the bouncers, but they don’t all three work at once, so’s it’s not too much out of my pocket.”

  “Come on, girl,” Delilah challenged, “don’t tell me you never take on private customers?”

  Fawn shifted her body, a wraith lost in the oversize chair. “Some girls do. I don’t.”

  “But what does Max get?” Jade demanded.

  Fawn’s blue eyes suddenly sparked fire. “He don’t get anything ’cept me dancing. Max don’t do girls.”

  “Well, pardon me,” Jade snipped, clearly skeptical.

  “Why did you become an exotic dancer, Fawn?” Mandy asked, also speaking softly, hoping to keep the shy young dancer talking.

  “There’s ads in the newspaper all the time. Big money, but you have to be over eighteen. I’d been wanting to leave home forever, but I knew I couldn’t make it by myself working a fast-food drive-thru. So I just kept gritting my teeth, promising myself what I’d do the minute I was old enough.” Fawn plucked at her black slacks, twisting a pleat between her fingers. “Only the day came I couldn’t wait any longer. I wasn’t quite seventeen when I walked out. If it hadn’t been for Max . . .”

  “Why did you have to leave home, Fawn?” Although Peter sensed the question was crucial, he kept his tone calm, with just enough authority to nudge the girl where he wanted her to go.

  “Same reason lots of girls do,” Fawn mumbled, ducking her head until her face was completely hidden behind a waterfall of shining brown hair.

  “And what reason is that?” Peter inquired gently.

  “Could I have more of that stuff?” the dancer asked, pointing toward the liqueur Peter had served after lunch.

  “The Grand Marnier? Sure.” Peter refilled her small glass. “Good stuff, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” Fawn sipped the liqueur, rolled it around on her tongue. This day was going to have to last a long time. Until she had enough to book out of this town and buy some of these things for herself. No man was ever going to buy her anything. Not ever. She was done with men for all of her life. They were meaner than snakes and only interested in what hung between their legs. And stupid enough to get off on a girl they could look at but not touch.

  “My stepdad,” Fawn said, “he was one of those guys who like ‘em young. Real young. Only he didn’t have to go to some street ho to playact being a baby. He had all he wanted right at home. I was only four when he began to do me. Told me I was sweet and precious, daddy’s little darling. Told me how much he loved me. I had trouble understandin’ that ’cuz it hurt like hell. When I got older and had sense enough to figure it wasn’t right, he told me it was all my fault. If I hadn’t been so pretty, I wouldn’t have enticed him to be bad. That’s the word he used: enticed. Said I was a bad girl, and if I told anybody, the cops’d send me to jail. And, stupid kid that I was, I believed him.”

  Though sickened, Mandy managed a glance around the room. Jade was nodding her head; so was Delilah. Fawn’s story was something they had heard many times before. “But what about your mother?” Mandy demanded.

  “Oh, her? She didn’t want to know,” Fawn replied with a sudden lift of her head, revealing golden eyes that flashed contempt. “My stepdad made good money. He was white collar, with a good county job. Really respectable. My mother wasn’t about to lose a meal ticket like that. He could have both of us as long as she could pretend everything was all right.”

  “And then?” Peter prodded gently.

&n
bsp; “And then he got kinky,” Fawn said. “The night he tried it with a curling iron, I left. It was that or bleed to death. Max took me in, and I been dancing ever since.”

  Mandy choked on the usual sympathetic words, so trite, so inadequate. Even Peter looked stunned.

  In the end it was Delilah who once again broke the appalled silence. “Y’ think . . . well, any o’ the dancers at yo’ place . . . any of ’em black?”

  “Yeah, but Max don’t like his girls strung out,” Fawn shot back, staring the other girl straight in the eye.

  “So maybe I c’d kick it if I didn’t have to give head ten times a day.”

  “Maybe you girls should get together later, see if you can work something out,” Peter suggested, struggling to keep his tone casual.

  Fawn eyed the black teenager’s figure as critically as a madam eyeing a prospective call girl. “I guess what you’ve got’s real?” she asked.

  “Hell, girl, you think a ho like me kin go for silicone? Where yo’ brains?”

  “Okay,” Fawn nodded, “we’ll talk.”

  So much for learning to read, Mandy thought sourly, then wondered if she were wrong. Maybe if Delilah was off drugs and off the streets . . . The ifs were pretty big, but she supposed faint hope was better than rock bottom despair. If nothing else, rescuing Delilah might help the bitter, sad-eyed little dancer feel better about herself.

  Chapter Six

  “There’s something else you ought to know,” Jade offered. She sat back on the sofa and crossed her legs, looking cool, elegant, and perfectly composed. Mandy sighed. Envying a callgirl hadn’t been on her list of expectations for the day.

  “Being in beauty pageants costs a bundle,” Jade began, “so my mother started me in modeling when I was about six. By the time I won Miss Manatee Bay and went to Miami for the Miss Florida pageant, I was pretty well known in the Florida market and making good money. So even though I didn’t win, I wasn’t really surprised when I was approached after the pageant with an offer of a modeling job in Rome. It seemed like a great break. All expenses, plus five thousand for a week of draping myself over some old statues and ruins.”

  Jade’s classically beautiful face darkened; perfect white teeth bit down on her invitingly full lower lip. “You’ve heard that saying, ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is’? Well, I don’t know how I could have been so stupid, but even Mom thought the job was legit.” Mandy noticed Peter come to attention, eyes alight with avid interest.

  “There were three other girls going to Rome,” Jade said. “All of us flying first class. We were real impressed. Anyway, we were met in Rome by this long-haired hunk with a limo who took us to a suite in the most gorgeous hotel I’d ever seen in my life. We all thought we’d hit the big time for sure. There was a cabinet full of liquor and a bathroom stocked with more drugs than Walgreen’s. At first I thought, Wow! And then I thought about all the other modeling jobs I’d been on—the early hours, the long days under hot lights, the absolute discipline so you look perfect in a close-up. And I got to wondering.”

  Jade suddenly glanced at Peter. “You’re thinking what a bunch of naive idiots we were, aren’t you?” she challenged. “Well, you’re exactly right.”

  “To be blunt,” Peter admitted, “I was trying to keep from shouting ‘Eureka!’ over finding somebody who’s actually had this experience.”

  Jade shot him a sharp look, nodded her acceptance. “Okay, so we’d been told to help ourselves to the goodies, order room service if we wanted, and someone would come by later to give us our instructions. For some reason—maybe the first smart thing I ever did in my life—I only ordered food and washed it down with a bottle of mineral water I found in the fridge. When the hunk who met us at the airport came back about eight that night, he had two guys with him. They were half a head taller than the hunk, and each must have outweighed him by fifty pounds or so. Talk about intimidating!

  “The hunk just smiled that heartthrob smile of his and said the men had to check our passports. The other girls were shittin’ bricks because they had these big guys pegged for cops and they were trying to look like Miss Prim and Propers when they’d been doing coke and popping pills for four, five hours straight. So we all handed over our passports, and those big kazoos didn’t even look at them, just stuffed them inside their jackets and left. Right away I knew we were in big trouble.

  “The other three girls—well, their brains were fried—they just stared at Mr. Hunk with this kind of dumb-blond look on their faces. And he just smiled his big old Italian smile and said, ‘Okay, girls, come on. Now we party.’

  “So I asked him how we could party if we had a photo shoot the next morning. He looked at me and winked one of those gorgeous bedroom eyes and said, “Don’t you get it, cara mia, this is a party shoot.”

  “You brought us here to party! I think I screamed it. This had been my big break. I had to be absolutely sure I understood him. You brought us here to be whores?

  And he just grinned and said, ‘Ah, si. Exactamente.’”

  “Gawd!” Delilah breathed. “What’d you do?”

  “I told him, Hell, no!” Jade said. “So he pulled a gun and made me pack my suitcase. He took my airplane ticket and what money I had and made me get in the limo with the other girls. By that time I was wondering if they had deep rivers and cement in Rome. But when we were in some real mean-looking back street, he dumped me out on the sidewalk with my two suitcases and left me standing there while he took the other girls to the party. Or at least he said that’s where they were going, kinda twisting the knife as he waved goodbye.”

  “You were damn lucky,” Peter said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jade replied. “At the time I was just pissed. It wasn’t until a lot later that I realized just how lucky I was. He could have beat me, raped me, or locked me in the room and had those guys come back and take me to wherever it is they sell their merchandise. Namely, me. But at the time I didn’t know about things like that, and I stood on my rights as a U. S. citizen, passport or no passport, and he let me go.”

  “So what did you do?” Fawn asked, echoing Delilah.

  “Well, there I was on the streets of Rome with no passport and no money. The part of town I was in wasn’t that great, but I walked—dragging my suitcases—until I came to a business that looked fairly respectable. I went in and asked for the Police. I didn’t know the word in Italian, but I had an idea it was pretty close to the English.”

  “Polizia,” Mandy murmured.

  “I also asked for the American Embassy. I figured almost anybody would recognize those two words. The guy in the shop kept giving me this smirk like, ‘I know what you’re doing here, girl,’ but the woman was real helpful. She called the police, and they took me to the Embassy. I got a fast passport, my mother wired money for the flight home, and some marine drove me to the airport.”

  Satisfied sighs of relief echoed around the room. “You used your head,” Peter approved. “Lots of girls in that situation never make it home.”

  “I think about the other three sometimes,” Jade admitted. “By the time the police checked the hotel, the room was empty. I wonder sometimes, did they party, collect their five grand and go home? Or did they just . . . disappear?”

  “Odds are,” Peter said, “they just disappeared. Into a brothel or someone’s private collection.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jade breathed. “I suppose, in a way, I didn’t really escape. We’d been promised five thousand for that week in Rome, and on the flight back I got to thinking maybe I’d been too uptight. Maybe I’d opted out too soon. At the time I’d never heard of trafficking, and I figured those girls had gotten a lot of money for shutting up and putting out. And, hell, I wasn’t some virgin just off the farm. So when I got home, I looked up the Escort Service with the biggest ad in the yellow pages and gave them a call. As long as I could stay around home, I told them. No out-of-town, let alone out-of-country, assignments.”

  “And it works for you?”
Delilah asked. “Yo’ git paid big money just to sit and wait for the damn phone to ring?”

  “Modern communication, child,” Jade murmured, flashing open her purse to reveal both a pager and a cell phone. “I’m never out of touch. You know, reach out and touch someone.” Jade’s flippancy faded. “Before I was married,” she added, “I worked full time, and a lot of it was a ball. But there was enough bad stuff that I snapped up the chance to opt out when Mark came along. Four years I was the perfect wife and mom.” Jade paused, staring blankly toward one of the sunny windows. “Then I went back to the life a couple of afternoons a week for just the reason I said. I want my girls to have the best. College and a real job and husbands who don’t have to wonder what their wives are doing to make a bit of extra cash.”

  “Don’t it spice up yo’ life, though?” Delilah demanded. “Tell it like it is, girl. Don’t you get off on var-I-e-ty, or maybe on doin’ somethin’ more naughty th’n nice?”

  Jade pushed her technological marvels back down in her small purse, zippered it closed. “Yeah, I suppose,” she murmured, “but nobody could ever call me The Happy Hooker.”

  They were half-way back to Golden Beach before Mandy broke the heavy silence that hung between them. “I imagine that was a bit more than you expected?”

  “Way more. Like striking a gusher.”

  “I believed them, didn’t you? Not a false note.”

  “Agreed. Though Fawn’s story is unusual. A runaway who actually managed to escape the sex trap.”

  “But . . . she’s a stripper.”

  “She’s not putting out. At least nothing more than a peep show.”

  “I guess.” Baring it all before a roomful of lecherous eyes and eager cocks seemed a pretty minimal step up from whoring. Then again, to Fawn the “No touch” rule was everything. Her release from the ultimate degradation. So maybe Peter was right. She shouldn’t be so judgmental. Her Puritan ancestors were showing.

  “Hell!” Peter’s fist slammed against the wheel. “It’s so damn frustrating. I knew I was fighting an uphill battle—this kind of thing’s been around since time began! Seeing those girls, hearing their stories, and realizing that on an international scale they’re the lucky ones . . . Dammit, Mouse, what makes me think I can make a difference?”