Everything about the night left him mortified at his own ignorance. He didn’t know enough Spanish, didn’t know enough about this realm of human exploitation, didn’t know that this organization, the Los Angeles Trafficking Rescue Emergency Action Network, even existed. As a homicide cop, in fact, he’d barely been aware of the shift toward thinking of these girls as “trafficked”—that is, as victims, as slaves—rather than arrestable young hookers. But this outfit had probably been sitting here, on the upper floor of a two-story above a falafel joint on Hollywood near the Egyptian, since back before the area Disneyfied.
Lorena had known all about it, though, and had called on the ride up from O.C. to arrange for someone to come into the office to meet them. She and Mariana had gotten out of the car and gone inside without a pleasantry, leaving him to wait on the street, and now she was coming back out alone. Waldo pointed east and they started toward the car. “Anybody asks,” she said, “we picked her up on Figueroa—downtown, not O.C.”
“How come?”
“Just do it, Waldo, okay?”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t; I’m just asking why.”
“If they knew she was on the street out of county, they wouldn’t be able to place her without a shitload of red tape. Biggest shelters wouldn’t even touch her. She could end up back out there, even worse than before.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“You should, too. You were a cop.”
“Well, I don’t. I didn’t even know that you knew this much.” Her silence felt like yet another reprimand. “So, what, they do placement?”
At the car, she reclaimed the driver’s side and held out her hand for the keys. “Placement, all kinds of victim services. Assistance through the court system. Education.”
“For the girls?”
“Not just for the girls,” she said, getting behind the wheel. “They try to make law enforcement less ignorant, too.”
He didn’t see her face as she said it, but it was the kind of shot she’d usually take with a smile. He figured he could help get things back on track by joking back. “They could use a better acronym, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“L.A. Trafficking Rescue Emergency Action Network? LATREAN?” He saw her face now, as she turned to him under the car’s interior lamp. No smile.
How had it gotten this bad, this fast? Could it really have been only weeks ago that they couldn’t get through a day without their clothes coming off more than once, Lorena relentlessly pitching him a vision of the life they could build together, an investigative power couple on an endless romantic adventure? It had been intimacy—full intimacy, not the facsimile he’d recently shared with Jayne White that helped him back into the world, not even the halfway, safety-on version he’d known with Lorena when they were younger—and the whole thing, the real thing, was so intoxicating that despite the grooves three years of solitude had worn on his soul, he’d let her maneuver him into using this case as a trial run.
Some power couple. They couldn’t agree on where to stop for lunch, let alone whether their client was some kind of teenage black widow. More ominously, the working relationship seemed to be snuffing out the physical. It had been three nights now. The first two of those she’d curled up against him, but last night she’d given his hand a squeeze and rolled away.
Then again, sex had gotten them into this and maybe it could get them out. Get back on track tonight, that’s all, and back to where they were before they’d ever heard of Stevie Rose.
Sometimes she showered with the bathroom door open, an explicit invitation; more often she left it closed but unlocked, available for a happy surprise. As he undressed, he had a flicker of insecurity: might she have bolted it tonight?
Or had she not, hoping he’d cross the divide?
There could be no better test.
Naked, tremulous, he queried the knob, this brass oracle from Restoration Hardware that knew his future.
It surrendered to his turn.
Behind the pebbled glass, Lorena stopped lathering. He pulled open the shower door. “Hi.”
“What are you doing?” The doorknob had lied. “No. Jesus.”
Mortified, he closed the bathroom door behind him and pulled on his jeans. He’d gotten it all wrong again.
He lay down on the bed and waited, staring at the ceiling and reviling himself. Think where her mind had been. Mariana. LATREAN. What was he thinking? Trying to repair their relationship through sex, on a night like this? Jackass.
When she emerged, again encased in the grannyesque flannel, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“You’re a fucking asshole. To go from all that tonight to sex?”
“I said, I’m sorry.”
“What, did that turn you on?”
“For God’s sake. I didn’t know, okay? The door was unlocked . . .”
“Fine, I’ll start locking the fucking door!” She stormed back into the bathroom and slammed it so hard he could hear the frame crack. He hadn’t seen her in the red zone like this, not since they’d been back together. He’d been lulled into thinking it was something she’d left in her twenties.
“I don’t think you’re being fair,” he said through the door, hoping to settle her down with reasonable words and a gentle tone. “You shouldn’t be angry at me over what’s happened to that girl. I didn’t do anything to hurt her.”
The door flew open. “That’s not why I’m angry at you.”
“Why, then?”
“She told me.”
“Who told you what?”
“That you came on to her.”
“Mariana—you mean on the street, when I was trying to—?”
“Stevie.”
“What? When?”
“In the pool house.”
“That did not happen. Not even close.”
“Well, something happened. When I walked in there, you could cut the vibe with a knife.”
“It’s in your head.”
“Uh-huh. She’s got you hypnotized, Waldo. Don’t even try to deny it.”
His jaw moved, but that was pretty much all he had.
“She makes me sick, that girl. Look at her next to Mariana—did you see her hand? That scar?” Waldo nodded. “Did she tell you what that shitstick did to her? He cut her and poured ink into it, to mark her. The rest of her life she’s going to have to look at that. Every single day.” The revulsion made his throat tighten. “Maybe—maybe—she can stay off the street, but that girl is never, ever going to be ‘normal.’ The world has totally fucked her over. And then you’ve got your precious little Stevie Rose, who’s been given everything, and what does she do with it? She fucks the world over. And you”—her disenchantment with him, her disgust, was bringing her almost to tears—“you don’t even see it.”
She disappeared again into the bathroom. He realized there was nothing he could do to get past her fury tonight. He took off his jeans again and slipped under the comforter in his boxers. He’d leave the nightly laundry for the morning. The safest thing now was to be as still as he could. He didn’t have any energy left anyway.
A few minutes later, Lorena came out and got into bed herself. After the long night of crossed signals, suddenly she could read his mind: “I don’t know where this is going either, Waldo. Let’s just get through this goddamn toxic case and then see what everything looks like.”
She turned her back to him and switched off her light, to wait for sleep, alone together, inches and a million miles apart.