Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [113]
“They’re children!”
“In Mexico? Half of them would be married by now. They’d be churning out babies already.”
“Keep telling yourself that, you sick motherfucker.”
“They’d be starving back home,” Dan said.
“Yeah, they look like they’re doing great here,” Tammy said. “Fuck you, Dan, I’m calling the cops.”
He clamped his hand around her throat, pulled her face close to his, and said, “If you do that, you stupid twat, I’ll kill you. And just in case you don’t care about your own useless life, think about the kids. Their families owe money to the guys who bring them in. If they don’t produce, the snakeheads take it out on their families. Capisce?”
She nodded, but he didn’t let her go for a few seconds, just to make a point. To make the point further, he unzipped his fly and forced her head down. “You open your mouth, it’s for this.” When he let her up, she could see, through watery eyes, the bouncer loading the girls into an old van.
A few seconds later, flames blew out the windows.
Dan drove her home.
She didn’t go to the cops. She went to the insurance company and told them that she saw him set the fire, that she could put him at the scene. It was a mistake, she’d tell Teddy later. She wanted to get back at Dan Silver, and she wanted them to look harder at the fire. Maybe they’d find something that would put them onto what was really happening there.
She did something else.
She looked for Luce.
Tammy went out to the strawberry fields, los campos fresas, and looked for the girl. Her first few trips, all she saw were the workers in the fields, and then one day, she left the new strip club she was working at and went straight out to the fields, arriving there shortly before dawn.
She saw a bunch of men leave the fields and walk down to the side of the river, where a stand of tall reeds hid the men from view. She drove down the road to the other side, parked her car, and walked in a little ways.
Tammy waited until all the field-workers had gone away and then went in. A Mexican man with a shotgun went to stop her, but Tammy ignored him and he let her pass. She found Luce on a “bed” of stamped-down reeds. Tammy took some hand wipes out of her bag and helped the girl clean herself off.
Speaking broken Spanish and English, she and the girl talked, but mostly she held the girl and stroked her hair. The man with the shotgun told her she’d have to go, that the pimps would come very soon to take the girls back to where they lived.
“Where do they live?” Tammy asked.
“All over the place. The men move them around,” he told her. “They go to different fields all day, or to hidden ‘factories,’ sometimes to the mojado camps at night. But they always bring them to this place, the strawberry fields, at sunrise every day.” The local pedophiles had a cute name for it. They called it “The Dawn Patrol.”
The man with the shotgun told Tammy again that she had to go.
“Tell her I’ll be back,” Tammy said. “What’s her name?”
The man, Pablo, asked the girl her name.
“Luce.”
“Luce, I’m Tammy. I’ll come back to see you, okay?”
Tammy did go back, three or four times a week. Pablo always escorted her in, and even the pimps who brought the girls in the van came to tolerate her when they saw that she wasn’t going to go to the police. She took Luce—and all the girls—food, clothing, cold medication, books. She took them condoms. She took them female love and affection.
It wasn’t enough.
Tammy confided in Angela. Told her all about Luce and the strawberry fields.
“They need medical care,” Tammy said. “They need a doctor.”
Angela took her to see Teddy. He had done Angela’s boobs—she had done him to get the insider discount.
Teddy didn’t believe her at first, thought she was a psycho. He felt sorry for her, figured she had been an abused child who had twisted her trauma into delusion. He was going to recommend a good psychiatrist, but Tammy challenged him to go and see for himself.
So Teddy rode up one day with her. He wanted to call the police. Tammy begged him not to, told him