Chapter Nine

Was it the next day? The same night?

In her cell, Jennifer didn't have a clue.

She had finally fallen asleep, then wakened, then slept again . . . for who knew how long?

The truth was, she was in shock. It was just too hard to believe. She couldn't be here, she just couldn't . . . but the sounds of a rat running across the floor at the end of the hall convinced her it was all too real.

She was caught, trapped, and could think of no reason why. Maybe a lunatic had done it. Yeah, what was she thinking? Of course, it had to be a lunatic, and she knew the one. That Lucky Avila. Of course. He was pissed at Michelle and her because they wouldn't let him have his way with them. That had to be it.

Jesus, the guy was off his rocker on methedrine. That was the deal, had to be. He was going to keep her here, scare the shit out of her . . . and maybe . . . God, maybe rape her.

And if he raped her, then he could never let her go. He'd have to ... God, she didn't want to think about it. Shit.

Do not panic! Do not freak out!

She took three deep breaths and let the air out slowly as she had been taught when studying yoga.

Chill. There had to be a way out.

And though part of her just wanted to lie there and cry, she wouldn't give in. Oh, no, she was going to battle. If it was Lucky Avila, he was going to be in for the fight of his life.

The first thing she had to do was find out if there was a way out of the cell. How did they do it in movies she had seen? Try to remember . . . Oh, right, the hero always looked up in the ceiling and found a loose tile. Then he climbed up there and got into an air duct and cruised right along until he found a way outside.

Jennifer got up and looked at the ceiling. It didn't take long before her hopes in that direction were dashed. There were no loose tiles because there were no tiles, period. The ceiling was concrete. She'd have one hell of a time getting through there. Maybe . . . maybe she could take the leg off of her bed and whack at the cement. Yeah, and maybe the guard would hear her and come down and dash her head against the wall.

What else? The toilet . . . wait, didn't she see a movie about a guy who dug out under his toilet and created a trench, which led to sewer lines?

No, that was wrong. She was conflating two movies. One was the The Great Escape, where they dug under the fence at the prison camp, and the other was Trainspotting, where a junkie dove into a toilet and swam into a cesspool.

Who was she kidding? She was a nurse. She knew nothing about how to escape from jail. Jennifer burst into tears. She was no heroine. She wasn't going to escape. She was going to die.

It was the first time she had let herself think that thought. Now she said it out loud, to convince herself of its terrible reality.

“You are going to die,” she said, and the sound of her own voice, low and trembling, was a shock to her.

It was true, wasn't it? She was going to die. They had brought her here to kill her.

Why?

She shed a few more tears, and then a strange calm came over her. She began to think, rather than panic.

Okay, she wasn't going to be able to go up into a handy air shaft, and she wasn't going to be able to dig a tunnel, either. She wasn't strong enough. And she probably didn't have enough time, even if she'd been built like a lady weightlifter.

But she was smart.

And so the thing to do was think. Think . . .

For example, if they were bringing only good-looking women here, then you would assume they were some kind of sex slave traffickers. Yeah, and they had to wait to take them away because . . . uh, because they had to set up the various houses of ill repute they were sending them to. Some girls would go to Asia, and maybe some to South America or Mexico. And that took time, and boats, and payoffs to authorities.

Maybe that was it.

But sex slaves? Didn't that mean really young kids? Maybe not. There were all kinds of people who wanted all kinds of sex.

She was twenty-four years old and she looked great in a bikini, and maybe some sick fucking drug czar wanted a good-looking Chinese girl that he could fuck until she was half-dead.

She began to feel her skin itch.

She had to talk to Gerri, figure out why they had been marked and if it was Lucky who had done it. Hadn't he mentioned to Michelle that he used to frequent some whorehouse? What was it called? The Jackalope Ranch, that was it.

Maybe she was there now. Maybe she was waiting her turn to be thrust into a life of prostitution.

She got up from her bed and moved back over to the corner of the cell door.

“Gerri,” she whispered.

No answer. Gerri must be sound asleep.

“Gerri,” she cried out now. “Wake the fuck up!”

“Huh? What—”

“It's me, Jennifer.”

“Geez, girlfriend, it's the middle of the night.”

“You can sleep when you're dead, Ger.”

“What the fuck? All right, what is it?”

“I want to know something.”

“Yeah, fine, we've established that. So, like what?”

“Are you . . . a hot chick?”

There was an outraged sigh.

“For this you wake me up inna middle of the fucking night? What you want to do, have some sex talk?”

“No, Gerri,” Jennifer said, forgetting all about whispering. “Sorry, not interested. I said it wrong. How old are you?”

“Twenty-four, baby.”

“And do you have a nice body?”

“You sick girl. We are in deep shit and you want to play lesbo games.”

“No, I want to know if you and I could be candidates for sex slavery.”

There, she had finally said it.

“Shit, I hope not,” Gerri said.

“And Mary, was she young, too?”

“Yeah, she was. Very young. Christ, maybe that's it. They sending us off to some foreign country to be whores.”

Jennifer sat down on the edge of the table in her cell.

“It could be that. It's the most logical thing.”

“Yeah, but I thought they did that mainly with little Asian girls. Like ten or twelve years old.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Jennifer said. “But in our new world of sexual diversity anything is possible. Besides, I'm Asian.”

There was a long silence from Gerri, and finally Jennifer heard her start to cry.

“I'm sorry,” Jennifer said. “I'm just trying to find some reason for all of this. Maybe if we find it we can somehow use what we know to get out of here.”

“Yeah, I get it, girl,” Gerri said. “But if they are really all about having us be sex slaves, there ain't nothing we can do. They got drugs, baby. I seen ‘em before. They knock you out and they rape you. And you ain't got a thing to say about it. And when they all done with you, they cut you up and throw yo ass away.”

Jennifer shook her head, and went quietly back to her bed.

She remembered something she'd heard in college. Knowledge shall set you free. Well, not all the time, baby. Not all the time.