A shirtless man on a bicycle peddled past us, riding the wrong way. His wheels were warped and he had to work the handlebars to keep from tipping over.
“Turn right up here,” she said. “Near the train.”
I tapped the brake and swung the wheel to turn onto Scott. We were parallel with the light-rail tracks. I started to accelerate, but Annie told me to make a quick right onto Reeves.
“This is one of the spots,” she said. “They like us to stay close to the train.”
I slowed to a stop, flipped the car into park, and listened to the windshield wipers squeak back and forth, barely cleaning the glass of the water that had collected on it. There was nobody here. We were alone.
I undid my seat belt. “You sure? This is the spot?”
Annie shifted in her seat, inching into the space between the seat and the door. She was facing me. “Yeah. One of them.”
She was right. This was one of the spots. Reeves and Scott. Delano and Berry streets. Milby and Tuam.
“When do I get my hit?” she asked.
“You can have it now,” I said. “Check the glove box. I’ve got a couple packets of potpourri in there. Take whatever you want.”
Her eyes lit up and she fumbled for the latch at her knee. She plucked it open and leaned toward the opening. She felt around for the drugs, but she pulled her hand back empty.
I rolled up my window.
“There’s nothing there,” she said.
“Sorry. Check under the seat, maybe I put them there.”
Annie reached down between her legs, bending forward as far as she could. I turned on the radio. It was a static-riddled AM station playing jazz. Herb Geller, I think. His saxophone cried through the blown speakers. It was like the sax was drowning.
Annie started to pull back from her search when I reached across the seat and placed my hand firmly on the back of her neck. She struggled, but my fingers slipped through the greasy tendrils of her mouse-brown hair. I wrapped them tightly and applied pressure, forcing her to stay down, while I used my other hand to manage an orange rope from underneath my seat and around her head. I pulled it tight around her throat and yanked her back toward me, where I could watch her.
Her eyes bulged, looking at me in a way that told me she either finally recognized me from the last time we’d been together, or she recognized that her sad, pathetic life was ending. The pain was almost over.
She kicked against the door, reached behind her head to grab at me with her fingers — the fingers she’d spent much of the night chewing. Annie was stronger than I’d figured. Her legs pushed. Her arms flailed. There was a determination, a desire to live I didn’t expect from a drug-addled hooker forced into the sex trade by bad men who kept her under their violent thumbs. For a split-second, I considered letting go, letting her breathe.
It crossed my mind I could give a couple of hundred from my wallet and put her on a Greyhound toward Oklahoma or Kansas. She could start clean.
Who was I kidding? There was no such thing as clean. So I pulled harder on the rope. I closed my eyes and tugged. I gritted my teeth and tightened my grip.
As I watched the life and color drain from her face, I promised her this was for the best. It was the same thing I’d told Mary Ann four nights earlier. And Liz a week before. And Cathy two months before that. And Jane. I couldn’t remember how long ago I’d helped Jane. Six months? Nine?
Annie’s body shuddered and went limp, her head dropping onto my shoulder as the rattle left her lungs. I sat there for a moment and stroked her forehead. I told her about the things I’d done, the women I’d saved one way or another. I told her she wouldn’t be the last. I couldn’t let her be the last. There were too many to help, too many to set free.
I told her how, in some ways, it had gotten easier with each of the girls. In some ways, it had gotten harder. I told her about how I’d first understood my calling, as Harvey roiled under the doors and walls of my dank first-floor apartment off the South Loop. I was neck-deep before I escaped, ducking under the water, tasting the gasoline and motor oil, the dog crap, and the grass clippings, as I’d swam through an open window and free of my home.
I’d blown the air from my lungs and surfaced next to a flooded Ford F-150. As I’d risen from the water, the distant calls for help, the sounds of sirens, and the whoosh of cars driving the wrong way on the Loop above filled the muggy air.
The lights were out. It had been dark, the sky almost milky from the storm that would not go. And yet, as I’d wiped the water from my eyes and spit it from my mouth, I could see clearly for the first time in a very long time.
The city needed this flood. It needed a cleansing. And after the waters were gone, it would need me.
I found the task itself less daunting, more automatic. It ushered in less anxiety but produced less of an artificial high. Mary Ann’s salvation hadn’t sustained me as long as Liz’s. Liz’s ascension wasn’t as satisfying as Cathy’s.
Somehow, I’d built up a tolerance.
I inched Annie off my shoulder, gently setting her upright in the passenger seat, and reached into my jacket pocket. It was still damp, but the pill bottle inside it was sealed. I uncapped it, shook the last of my Cilatopram into my mouth, and chewed.
On the radio, Geller’s sax screeched through the broken tweeter, sweetly eulogizing the girl next to me. Outside, the clouds grew too heavy and the rain started again.
City of Girls
by Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Aldine
Sergeant Dan Correal opened the door and heard the delicious hush, the whir of the air-conditioning, and the dog snoring gently on the couch. He locked up his holster in the safe, put in the Glock 22, which he’d secretly named Lady Lisa, after his wife. Just taking off the holster made his shoulders and neck ache as if he’d lifted weights for hours, like he used to, but he had hardly moved much from the seat of his cruiser for his entire shift.
At the end of his shift, he’d had to make a domestic disturbance call on Bissonnet, and he already felt old and grizzled as he climbed the apartment steps to the third floor. His radio and its perpetual buzz, the sun’s hot-white glare still strong in the fall, gave him a headache that pulsed into his ears.
He’d knocked on the apartment door, which pushed it open. A young woman, Charlie, stood in a transparent black shift dress. She was a regular, both sad and disturbingly attractive to Dan with her shifty, bottomless gaze, full lips, dark eyes. “He’s already gone,” she said, pushing back her hair into a sleepy pile, a mound of soft cleavage peeking through the V in her dress. Dan shifted his eyes quickly to the window, the spoons, the collection of flip-flops and heels that had been kicked off by the door. A pair of brown work boots, the laces undone in long snakes.
She’d met his gaze, made a small, teasing smile. “Oh, he left those, I guess.” She’d sighed and walked to the kitchen. He did his check, his to-do, and left.
Now, without the weight of the pistol and its responsibility, he let himself think about the black lace trimming Charlie’s breasts. She looked just like his daughter’s friend Chickie, and this thought both plagued and haunted Dan every time he saw her on his calls. Chickie’s little doppelgänger, he’d thought as he saw her striding toward him in a spaghetti-strap dress, the weight of her breasts, the curve of her ass.
Dan closed the bathroom door behind him. He hadn’t changed out of his uniform, wanted to feel the cold dangle of his handcuffs a little. Chickie, in Charlie’s black dress, pulling up the thin hem, pulling down her panties. He remembered the massage parlor, as he did during these moments — that hole-in-the-wall where his father took him for his first time. Those red lips, the mix of humiliation and the sheer pleasure of an orgasm with a live girl, the warm flesh beneath his hands, its softness and its salty taste. Chickie and her wet lips.